This study focuses on Swedish political press conferences and explores the discursive efforts of politicians to express unity despite diverging ideological views. It concerns the use of the first person pronoun ‘we’ (Swedish. we) and is influenced by both dialogue theory and linguistic theories, which highlight the meaning of pronouns in context. The data consist of transcribed web broadcasts of press conferences with the leaders of the four political parties that form the Swedish Government since 2006. Our analysis reveals that a clear-cut use of the personal pronoun ‘we’ can serve the same political purposes as a more ambiguous use, i.e. to show unity while there are differences. The four party leaders are involved in a communicative project of ‘doing unity’ to demonstrate that they are a very capable government.
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Cited by
Cited by 8 other publications
Amado, Adriana & Nicolás Rotelli
2022. Prácticas periodísticas en las conferencias de prensa presidenciales en Argentina. Estudios sobre el Mensaje Periodístico 28:4 ► pp. 739 ff.
Li, Tao & Kaibao Hu
2021. Corpus-Based Translation Studies and Political Discourse Analysis. In Reappraising Self and Others [Corpora and Intercultural Studies, 6], ► pp. 13 ff.
Mitchell, Philip & James Stewart
2017. Who are We?. Journalism Practice 11:4 ► pp. 417 ff.
Santulli, Francesca & Chiara Degano
2022. Agreement through Language. In Agreement in Argumentation [Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, 31], ► pp. 49 ff.
Turnbull, Margo
2023. Assembling the Crisis of COVID-19 in Australia: A Foucauldian Analysis of Prime Ministerial Press Conferences in March 2020. Genealogy 7:3 ► pp. 66 ff.
Van Herck, Rebecca, Babette Dobbenie & Sofie Decock
2021. Person- versus content-oriented approaches in English and German email responses to customer complaints: a cross-cultural analysis of moves and first-person pronouns. Intercultural Pragmatics 18:2 ► pp. 203 ff.
Watson, Cate & Aileen Ireland
2021. Boards in action: processes and practices of ‘strategising’ in the Boardroom. Journal of Management and Governance 25:3 ► pp. 933 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 2 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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