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Article published In:
Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 18:5 (2019) ► pp.760–781

Who are we?

Contesting meanings in the speeches of national leaders in Taiwan during the authoritarian period

| Soochow University
| National Taitung University
This paper analyzes how political aspirations and convictions during Taiwan’s authoritarian period (from the 1940s to 1996) are expressed through first-person plural pronouns. Combining both corpus-assisted method and discourse historical analysis (DHA, Wodak et al. 1999), we compared the speeches delivered by the presidents – Chiang Kai-shek (CKS, 1955–1975), Chiang Ching-kuo (CCK, 1978–1988), and Lee Teng-hui (LTH, 1989–1996) – from the one-party domination era to the time of the direct presidential elections in 1996. Moreover, by locating lexical items in the co-texts and checking the collocates, we have tried to find referents of we against changing socio-political contexts. The meaning of we has changed from representing Chinese compatriots on the Chinese mainland and the revolutionary militia in CKS’s speeches to an over-inclusion and more hearer-dominant (HD) we in CCK’s speeches. A “wandering we” was found in LTH’s speeches with which a well-defined national collectivity was difficult to identify in the late 1980s.
Keywords: first-person plural pronoun, Taiwan, national leaders’ speeches
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1A Discourse historical approach (DHA) to national identities
    • 2.2First person plural in political speeches
  • 3.Data and methodology
    • 3.1Data
    • 3.2Methodology
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1 Women 我們 ‘we’ in CKS’s speeches
    • 4.2 Women 我們 ‘we’ in CCK’s speeches
    • 4.3 Women 我們 ‘we’ in LTH’s speeches
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 24 April 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.17069.wei
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