Informace o publikaci
Leadership in numbers The pragmatics of We in Singapore’s NDR speeches (2004–2023)
| Autoři | |
|---|---|
| Rok publikování | 2025 |
| Druh | Článek v odborném periodiku |
| Časopis / Zdroj | Journal of Language and Politics |
| Fakulta / Pracoviště MU | |
| Citace | |
| www | https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/jlp.25089.che |
| Doi | https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.25089.che |
| Klíčová slova | political pragmatics; personal pronouns; corpus linguistics; leadership discourse; Southeast Asian politics; deixis and modality |
| Popis | This paper examines how former Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong strategically deployed personal pronouns — especially we — in National Day Rally (NDR) speeches (2004–2023) to construct authority, manage affect, and negotiate state–citizen alignment. Situated within Singapore’s hybrid political system, the study adopts a corpus pragmatic approach combining frequency analysis, collocate profiling, and a substitution-based method to track inclusive and exclusive we alongside broader patterns of I, you, and they. Informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), deixis, and modality, the analysis shows that we functions as an indexical pivot modulating institutional stance around elections, milestones, and crises: exclusive we dominates early speeches and reflects technocratic leadership, while inclusive forms rise during periods of public outreach and pandemic response. These findings demonstrate that pronoun choice acts as a rhetorical device for distributing agency, calibrating legitimacy, and adapting leadership style to political context. |