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Self- and Other-Reference in Social Contexts: From global to local discourses
Edited by Minna Nevala and Minna Palander-Collin
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 342] 2024
► pp. 39–61

Chapter 3
Self-reference as an argumentative tool

Discourse by politicians and experts during the Covid-19 pandemic

| Université catholique de Louvain
| University of Groningen

In this chapter, we analyse how politicians and experts from Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain involved in the Covid-19 crisis construct self-reference on Twitter (currently X), combining linguistic approaches to person reference and argumentation theory. On the one hand, we show that uses are fairly similar across the three countries, in spite of the considerable differences as to government measures concerning the pandemic. On the other hand, differences can be found between the different professional categories. Whereas politicians mainly use self-reference to build their ethos, the experts rather support the ethos of others. In showing how these uses contribute to building or employing ethos, we also demonstrate that these uses can ultimately be understood as having argumentative functions on Twitter.

Keywords: person reference, self-reference, Covid-19, Twitter (X), ethos, argumentation, pragmatics, discourse
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background: Self-reference and argumentation
    • 2.1Self-reference
    • 2.2Ethos and argument
  • 3.Corpus and methodology
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Individual self-reference
    • 4.2Collective self-reference
  • 5.Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 March 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.342.03dec
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