Article published in:
Pragmatics
Vol. 23:1 (2013) ► pp. 51–67

Strategic use of nouns and pronouns in public discourse

The case of the fine-tuning of the medium of instruction policy in Hong Kong

This paper discusses how the first person pronouns ‘I’ and ‘We’ and the two proper nouns ‘the Education Bureau [EDB]’ and ‘the Government’ were used strategically by government officials in an attempt to delineate the level of involvement and commitment of the officials themselves, the EDB and the Hong Kong Government in the course of implementing and fine-tuning the medium-of-instruction policy in Hong Kong’s secondary schools. The data comprises the speeches delivered at various formal educational occasions and the documents issued and distributed to various stakeholders of the secondary education in Hong Kong. The clauses having these pronouns and proper nouns as either the Agent or Beneficiary were identified and examined in order to find out: (1) the level of commitment of the officials/administrative entities with reference to the process types used; (2) the level of commitment of these officials/administrative entities with reference to the modality level chosen; (3) the power status of the officials/administrative entities; and (4) the specific role, if any, played by the officials/administrative entities. Systemic functional grammar was the framework being drawn upon in undertaking the analysis.
Keywords: Beneficiary, Agent, Modality, Process type, Medium of instruction
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 01 March 2013
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.23.1.03ho
References
Bolivar, Adriana
(1999) The linguistic pragmatics of political pronouns in Venezuelan Spanish. In J. Verschueren (ed.), Selected Papers (Vol. 1) From the 6th International Pragmatics Conference.Antwerp: International Pragmatics Association, pp. 56-69.Google Scholar
Bull, Peter, and Anita Fetzer
(2006) Who are we and who are you? The strategic use of forms of address in political interviews. Text & Talk 26.1: 3-37.  BoP CrossrefGoogle Scholar
van Dijk, Teun
(2006) Discourse and manipulation. Discourse & Society 17.2: 359-383. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Education Commission
(2005) Report on Review of Medium of Instruction for Secondary Schools and Secondary School Places Allocation. Hong Kong: Printing Department.Google Scholar
Education Bureau, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government
(2009) Education Bureau Circular No. 6/(2009) Fine-tuning the medium of instruction for secondary schools.
Education Commission, Hong Kong Government
(1990) Report No. 4: The Curriculum and Behavioral Problems in Schools. Hong Kong: Government Printer.Google Scholar
Education Department
(1997) Medium of Instruction: Guidance for Secondary Schools. Hong Kong: Printing Department.Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman
(1989) Language and Power. London: Longman.  BoPGoogle Scholar
(1993) Critical discourse analysis and the marketization of public discourse: The universities. Discourse and Society 4.2: 133-168. Crossref  BoPGoogle Scholar
Fetzer, Anita, and Peter Bull
(2008) “I don’t mean you personally, forgive me, I mean generally”. The strategic use of pronouns in political interviews’. Journal of Language and Politics 7.2: 271-285. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Givón, Talmy
(1976) Topic, pronoun, and grammatical agreement. In C. Li (ed.), Subject and Topic. New York: Academic Press, pp. 149-188.Google Scholar
Goffman, Ervin
(1981) Forms of Talk. Oxford: Blackwell.  BoPGoogle Scholar
Halliday, Michael, and Christian Matthiessen
(2004) An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 3rd ed. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Ho, Victor
(2010a) Constructing identities in the workplace through request e-mail discourse – how does one benefit from it? GEMA Online Journal of Language Studies 10.2: 3 – 18.Google Scholar
(2010b) Constructing identities through request e-mail discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 421: 2253 – 2261. Crossref  BoPGoogle Scholar
Hodge, Robert, and Gunther Kress
(1988) Social Semiotics. Cambridge: Polity Press.  BoPGoogle Scholar
Hong Kong Government
(1965) Education Policy. Hong Kong: Government Printer.Google Scholar
Inigo-Mora, Isabel
(2004) On the use of the personal pronoun we in communities. Journal of Language and Politics 3.1: 27-52. Crossref  BoPGoogle Scholar
Kamio, Akio
(1994) The theory of territory of information: The case of Japanese. Journal of Pragmatics 211: 67-100. Crossref  BoPGoogle Scholar
(2001) English generic we, you and they: An analysis in terms of territory of information. Journal of Pragmatics 331: 1111-1124. Crossref  BoPGoogle Scholar
Marsch, R, and J. Sampson
(1963) Report of Education Commission. Hong Kong: Government Printer.Google Scholar
Pennycook, Alastair
(1994) The politics of pronouns. ELTJ 48.2: 173–178. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Proctor, Katarzyna, and Lily Su
(2011) The 1st person plural in political discourse - American politicians in interviews and in a debate. Journal of Pragmatics 431: 3251-3266. Crossref  BoPGoogle Scholar
Pyykkő, Riitta
(2002) Who is ‘us’ in Russian political discourse. In A. Duszak (ed.), Us and others: Social identities across languages, discourses and cultures.Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 233-238. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Reyes-Rodríguez, Antonio
(2008) Discursive strategies in Chavez's political discourse: Voicing, distancing, and shifting. Critical Discourse Studies 5.2: 133-152. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Teo, Peter
(2004) “Clean and green - That’s the way we like it”: Greening a country, building a nation. Journal of Language and Politics 3.3: 485-505. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, John
(1990) Politically Speaking. Oxford: Blackwells.  BoPGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Andrew, and David Zeitlyn
(1995) The distribution of person-referring expressions in natural conversation. Research on Language & Social Interaction 28.1: 61–92. Crossref  BoPGoogle Scholar
Zupnik, Yael
(1994) A pragmatic analysis of the use of person deixis in political discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 211: 339–383. Crossref  BoPGoogle Scholar

Full-text

Strategic use of nouns and pronouns in public discourse
Cited by

Cited by 4 other publications

Furko, Peter
2017. Manipulative uses of pragmatic markers in political discourse. Palgrave Communications 3:1 Crossref logo
Furkó, Péter B.
2020.  In Discourse Markers and Beyond, ► pp. 65 ff. Crossref logo
Millar, Sharon
2015.  In Discourse, Politics and Women as Global Leaders [Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 63], ► pp. 67 ff. Crossref logo
Zahrah, Fatima, Jason R. C. Nurse & Michael Goldsmith
2020.  In 2020 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (EuroS&PW), ► pp. 438 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 17 april 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.