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Article published In:
Corpus-Pragmatic Studies of Democratization in Public Discourses: New perspectives, methods and materials
Edited by Turo Hiltunen, Turo Vartiainen and Jenni Räikkönen
[Journal of Historical Pragmatics 25:2] 2024
► pp. 274–301

Speaking for the downtrodden

The pragmatics of pronominal references in 200 years of activist speeches

ORCID logo | Linnaeus University,
| Paris Nanterre University,
| Tampere University,
| Linnaeus University,
| Linnaeus University,
| Linnaeus University,
Most linguistic studies of political speaking in the field of critical discourse analysis tend to focus on speeches delivered by prominent politicians either in a domestic party-political setting or in the international arena. Less attention has been afforded to speeches by civil rights activists and campaigners for other progressive causes. To fill this gap, the present paper focuses on political speaking occurring outside of the party-political setting. The data comprises 120 American activist speeches from the years 1808–2016. The analysis focuses on the construction of ingroups and outgroups, and whether the use of personal pronouns is affected by the type of audience. The frequency trends bring forth new information about the referential complexity of pronouns within individual speeches.
Keywords: activist speeches, political speaking, burstiness, pronominal reference, audience design
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Pronominal reference and the constructing of ingroups and outgroups in political discourse
    • 2.2Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) and historical pragmatics
  • 3.Data and methods
    • 3.1Diachronic corpus of political speeches and the activist speeches
    • 3.2Annotation procedure
      • 3.2.1Definition of annotation terms
    • 3.3Statistical considerations
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 9 August 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00076.tyr
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