The first online meeting of the Inequality, Culture and Difference research centre, will be held on Wed 28/10/2020 13:00 - 14:00 where we will be joined by our very own Jamie Williams and David Wright, talking about their fascinating research on the UK governments' daily communications with the British public during the coronavirus pandemic.
Pronominal ambiguity and ascriptions of responsibility in the UK daily coronavirus briefings
Jamie Williams
David Wright
Nottingham Trent University
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.
