ABSTRACT |
The purpose of this paper is to analyse some of the uses of person
deixis, as exemplified by personal pronouns, by the main Northern Irish
Parties in the 2003 Assembly-election campaign. The corpus of the
analysis will be a selection of 12 broadcasted TV advertisements, which
we believe are representative not only of political but also of
advertising communication. We suspect that in political discourse
pronoun selection is frequently determined because of the pragmatic
values the chosen pronouns may promote. Therefore, we hypothesise that
through pronominal choice political parties can show their solidarity –
or distance – with certain political identities, mainly by relying on
the political opposition between “us” and “them”. Moreover, pronoun
selection seems to be a useful persuasive device because of the
affective framework that deictics – and more specifically pronouns - can
establish between both the speaker and the addressee.
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