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Part of
Constructing Collectivity: 'We' across languages and contexts
Edited by Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 239] 2014
► pp. 331–350

“Judge us on what we do”

The strategic use of collective we in British 
political discourse

| University of Augsburg, Germany

This chapter examines the referential domain, communicative function and perlocutionary effect of the first person plural pronoun we in dialogic and monologic British political discourse. Its methodological framework is an integrated one, combining interactional sociolinguistics, in particular co-occurrence and conversational inference, with quantitative and qualitative corpus analysis. The first part presents the methodological framework, focussing on the two types of discourse and the genre-specific distribution of self-references expressing collectivity considering the pronoun we and possible juxta-positioning of self and others. Particular attention is given to the construction of more generalized and more particularized types of collectivity. The second part presents the micro-analysis, distinguishing between local contexts in which collectivity is entextualized and others where the referential domains of the indexicals are left underspecified.

Published online: 27 February 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.239.21fet
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