A Critical Analysis Of The First Person Plural Pronoun 'WE' In The U.S. Presidential Campaign Speeches

Language is an important way to construct political elections,which enables discourse analysts to deconstruct political elections by analyzing the meaning of discursive symbols.An important field of presidential electoral studies focuses on how politicians' gain leadership through discursive strategies(Tenorio,2002;Fang,2009;Dilliplane,2012;Yuan & Jiang,2013;Steffens & Haslam,2013;Zhang,2015;Gunawan,2017;Chen & Zhang,2017;Chen,2018;Chou & Yeh,2018;Liu & Lei,2018;Savoy,2018;Zhu,2019).The first person plural pronoun ‘WE' has been proved as a discursive strategy for politicians to construct identities and leadership(Burke,1969;Wilson,1990;Fina,1995;Cillia et al.,1999;Pyykk?,2002;Skar?y?ska,2002;í?igo-Mora,2004;Petersoo,2007;Wang & He,2012;Fetzer,2014;Alavidze,2017;Gao & Su,2017;Zhang,2017).Although prior research has proved that pronoun ‘WE' in political discourse can help politicians acquire leadership,few studies systematically investigated the relationship between the use of pronoun ‘WE' in campaign speeches and the relative size of candidates' leadership in a political election.This dissertation aims to examine whether pronoun ‘WE' in campaign speeches can be adopted as a linguistic indicator to reveal the relative scale of candidates' leadership in political elections.If it can be adopted,we hypothesize that a candidate who relatively has an advantage in the use of ‘WE' is more likely to succeed in an election.Winners use more ‘WE' to refer to more people than losers do.Research questions are listed as follow.(1)How did bipartisan presidential nominees use first person plural pronouns ‘WE' in campaign speeches?(2)How did bipartisan presidential nominees use first person plural pronouns ‘WE' in campaign speeches to construct leadership?Taking four U.S.presidential elections as an example,this study extracts 24 presidential campaign speeches of bipartisan nominees and examines three indicators of 3,588 first person plural pronouns ‘WE': frequency,referent and referential effectiveness.Adopting threedimensional approach to critical discourse analysis,the social identity theory and semantic and pragmatic studies on ‘WE',we quantify the referential scope of pronoun ‘WE' and comprehensively compare bipartisan nominees' use of pronoun ‘WE'.Results indicate that bipartisan nominees all consciously adopt pronoun ‘WE' but there is a difference between winners' and losers' use of ‘WE'.(1)At the textual level,all candidates frequently employed ‘WE' to develop good interpersonal relationships with voters;Winners employed more ‘WE' in campaign speeches than losers did;(2)At the discursive practice level,candidates adopted ‘WE' to highlight eight kinds of shared social identities with voters like ‘American people',bring voters to their group and win voters' supports;Compared to that in losers',‘WE' in winners' campaign speeches exhibits wider referential scope and stronger referential effectiveness.(3)At the social contextual level,the U.S.electoral system,the party system and the socio-historical background contribute to the fact that bipartisan presidential nominees consciously manipulated the frequency and the referent of ‘WE' to construct and sustain shared social identities with voters,express ideologies and gain leadership;Statistical tests present that ‘WE' in winners' campaign speeches has significantly stronger referential effectiveness than that in losers'.We can deconstruct linguistic predictor ‘WE' in the U.S.presidential campaign speeches to reveal the relative scale of bipartisan nominees' leadership in a presidential election.By deconstructing four U.S.bipartisan nominees' campaign speeches,this dissertation conducted a quantitative and qualitative analysis on how bipartisan nominees use first person plural pronouns to construct shared social identities with voters and gain leadership.We further substantiated that the way bipartisan candidates to use first person plural pronouns in campaign speeches relates to the relative size of their leadership in an election.Future studies can investigate whether this relationship can be applied to political elections of other major countries.