| This study advances linguistic knowledge about the discursive construction of national identity by unveiling discursive strategies of presidential speechmaking that bind people together and organize them into a "large-scale solidarity" (Renan 1990) from which "the others" are excluded. While every member of a nation participates in re-producing the national discourse, a leader's discourse has an overarching reach, exposure and importance. The discourse of a leader is employed to repair troubled identities, fortify national unity, assure membership and, in times of conflict with another nation, "remind the followers why the most supreme of all sacrifices is being called upon" (Billig 1995:1).; The study builds on the central assumptions that the nation is imagined, and that national membership is interactionally constructed through discourse. By choosing state of the nation presidential addresses as a research site, I sought to identify repetitive strategies in discursive construction of national identity through a comparative, cross-linguistic, cross-cultural, and cross-polity study. I re-define political address as dialogical interaction among participants, which suggests a new view of the speaker and audience roles. Using a theoretical and methodological framework that combines pragmatic, ethnomethodological, interactional and critical aspects of discourse analysis with positioning theory and social identity theory, I consider linguistic strategies of group-inclusion and exclusion. Metalingual mitigation markers have a role in marking attention and negotiating politeness, pronominal use is aimed at constructing interactional relations that define dynamics of group inclusion, while deagentivization, vagueness, and distancing are among strategies of excluding "the others".; From a sociolinguistic perspective, this study lays the foundations for an interactional approach to political speechmaking, and charts a course for further research on discursive construction of national identities by merging analytical approaches from linguistics, psychology and sociology. Discourse analysis is shown to have capabilities for heuristic integration with psychological and sociological approaches that increase its potential for revealing strategies central to the social organization of our lives. In a dialogue with studies on national identity across disciplines, this study complements those in political and social sciences aimed at identifying the ways political discourse is used to fortify ideological foundations for nationalism. |
