Paper 019: Pronominal Ambiguity and Ascriptions of Responsibility in the UK Daily Coronavirus Briefings
WILLIAMS, Jamie (Nottingham Trent University, UK); WRIGHT, David (Nottingham Trent University, UK)
Keywords: discourse, corpus-based discourse analysis, political discourse, COVID, coronavirus
Abstract
Within political discourse, pronouns have been highlighted as important linguistic features due to their inherent ambiguity, and their roles in creating distance or closeness and accepting or denying responsibility for actions (Fetzer and Bull, 2008; Mulderrig, 2012). These issues are pertinent to the COVID-19 pandemic, as governments attempt to clearly communicate guidance to the general public, as well as describe steps being taken to slow the virus’ spread. Within the context of the United Kingdom, one of the worst affected countries globally, we investigated how pronouns were used by governmental speakers to administer responsibility and whether they contributed to reported criticisms of ambiguity in the government’s communications (Oliver, 2020).
A corpus of 92 political speeches, totalling 117,779 words, was constructed based upon official transcripts from the UK government’s website. Focussing on the use of the first person plural (1PL) pronouns, 3,045 concordance lines were analysed to identify (1) their referent – particularly if they carried an exclusive (we – the government) or inclusive (we – the country) reading, and (2) the transitivity patterns these pronouns act as Participants in (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014).
We argue that the UK government uses the inherent ambiguity between the exclusive and inclusive readings of this pronoun to mitigate their own portrayed responsibility for controlling the spread of the virus. We argue that they do so through at least two means. Firstly, when using 1PL pronouns in an exclusive manner, although they represent themselves overwhelmingly as Actors, they obscure the precise details about the measures they are taking. Secondly, when using the 1PL pronouns in an inclusive manner, they represent the British public as co-Actors in processes they have no control over and indeed are usually considered to responsibility of the government themselves.
Fetzer, A. and Bull, P. (2008) ‘Well, I answer it by simply inviting you to look at the evidence’: The strategic use of pronouns in political interviews. Journal of Language and Politics, 7(2): 271–289.
Halliday, M.A.K. and Matthiessen, C.I.I.M. (2014). Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar, 4th Edition. London: Routledge.
Mulderrig, J. (2012) The hegemony of inclusion: A corpus-based critical discourse analysis of deixis in education policy. Discourse and Society, 23(6): 701–728.
Oliver, D. (2020) Covid-19 highlights the need for effective government communications. BMJ, 369: m1863, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m1863.
Presentation video
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Q&A live (Zoom) session
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This looks to be a very interesting paper. I hope you enjoy the conference! – Organizing committee
Thanks for sharing your work on this fascinating (and very current) dataset!
Are you aware of any similar projects being carried on governmental briefings in other countries? I should think this would make for some very interesting comparisons in crisis communication approaches. I live and work in Germany so my first thought was how the use of pronouns might different in the communication of the German government, but comparisons with France, Austria, Spain and Italy, for instance would also be very interesting.
Looking forward to hearing/reading about the other patterns that you’ve uncovered in exploring this dataset!
Hi Elen – I’m sure there is some work out there looking at the speeches in other countries, but I don’t know of any to hand (and whether they are looking at pronouns in particular – the data sets are all still very new and the situation, as we all know – is very much still with us!).
Comparing different countries is something that would be important and interesting. We are planning (hopefully) to look at the differences between the UK government and the other devolved governments in the UK (the Welsh Senedd and the Scottish government in particular) as the reaction to these governments – well at least in the Welsh context which I’m more familiar with – has been much more positive than to the UK government. I’m not aware of this kind of “blame-game” criticism being leveled at those administrations.
Languages with different pronominal systems (formality distinctions in the case of German, and maybe pro-drop languages in cases like Italian) may make an interesting comparison – hopefully the kind of work you elude to will be done in the future
Thanks for sharing your work! How did you generate the 3,116 concordance lines? By searching the top 20 keywords?
Hi Yuyating – the 3,116 concordance lines are all those clauses where “we” is a participant. This number is larger than the actual number of times “we” appears in the data set because of cases where it is an elided subject in clause complexes.
Great talk Jamie and David!
Elen – myself and Kate Power from our university of queensland are currently comparing AUS/NZ prime ministers’ COVID briefings over time in a similar way (we will add pronouns to our investigation!), testing how the perception that female (NZ) vs male (AUS) leaders were ‘handling’ the crisis may be formed at the linguistic level. Its a WIP, but watch this space.
DRPRC80 is Peter Crosthwaite BTW
Thanks Peter! Your work sounds really interesting. Looking forward to seeing what you find!
Amazing work! Thanks for sharing! I’m from Spain and it’d so interesenting to see how Spanish government and also the political opposition use the pronouns nowadays (covid era hahah)! Right now, the use of ‘we’ (nosotros in Spanish) and ‘the government’ (el gobierno), for example, to attack the opponent, or to defend oneself, maybe to show off some political or sanitary decisions, etc., comes to my mind.
It’s quite interesting!!!!
Thanks Leyre. That would be interesting!