Article published In:
Journal of Language and Politics: Online-First Articles

Revisiting the rhetorical construction of political consent

‘We-strategies’ and pronouns in British and Russian Covid-19 discourse

ORCID logo | University of Catania
| RUDN University
| RUDN University
How political leaders construct consent is a constant theme of studies in political rhetoric and theories of persuasion. We explore how populist linguistic strategies combine with traditional consensus-building to align populations with the speakers’ messages. We observe similarities and differences in discourse strategies across two contrasting polities, the UK, a foundational modern representative democracy and Russia, which is considered more autocratic. The data comes from speeches given by Boris Johnson and Vladimir Putin during the Covid-19 crisis. They were analysed using Corpus Linguistics, compared in qualitative analysis that identities key lexico-grammatical features. The findings show a convergence in some of the strategies and linguistic styles, but also key differences which, we suggest, depend on cultural factors specific to the two nations. The results contribute to our understanding of the operation of these resources in modern political discourse, highlighting the way cultural factors influence rhetorical styles in very different political structures.
Keywords: political discourse, persuasion, strategy of involvement, English, Russian
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Background and research aims
  • 2.We-strategy and the pragmatics of pronoun use
  • 3.Data and methodology
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Use of ‘we’
    • 4.2Use of ‘I’
    • 4.3Other lexical/ discursive means of construing community/solidarity
    • 4.4Emotive persuasion, distance reduction, informality and populism
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 29 March 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.22199.pon
References (60)
References
Aiolfi, Théo. 2022. Populism as a Transgressive Style. Global Studies Quarterly 1, no. 2. [URL]. DOI logo
Al-Salman, Saleh, and Ahmad S. Haider. 2021. “Covid-19 Trending Neologisms and Word Formation Processes in English.” Russian Journal of Linguistics 25, no. 1: 24–42. [URL]. DOI logo
Aristotle and Robert C. Bartlett. 2019. Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Benwell, Bethan and Elizabeth Stokoe. 2006. Discourse and Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bilá, Magdalena, Alena Kačmárová and Ingrida Vaňková. 2020. “The Encounter of Two Cultural Identities: The Case of Social Deixis.” Russian Journal of Linguistics 24, no. 2: 344–365. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blondel, Jean and Ferdinand Müller-Rommel. 2009. “Political Elites.” In The Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior, edited by Russell J. Dalton and Hans-Dieter Klingemann. 818–32. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Vol. 41. Cambridge, Cambridge university press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Busygina, Irina and Mikhail Filippov. 2015. “The Calculus of Non-Protest in Russia: Redistributive Expectations from Political Reforms.” Europe-Asia Studies 67, no. 2: 209–223. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Castro Seixas, Eunice. 2021. “War Metaphors in Political Communication on Covid-19.” Frontiers in Sociology. DOI logo 2020.Google Scholar
Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2004. Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Chen, Chinchih, Frey Carl, Benedikt and Giorgio Presidente. 20221. “Culture and Contagion: Individualism and Compliance with Covid-19 Policy.” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organisation, no. 190 (October): 191–200. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chilton, Paul A. 2004. Analysing Political Discourse: Theory and Practice. London and New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chilton, Paul A., and Christina Schäffner. 2011. “Discourse and Politics.” In Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction, edited by Teun Van Dijk. 303–330. London: Sage. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Churchill, Winston. 1940. “First Speech as Prime Minister to the House of Commons.” Accessed February 12, 2024. [URL]
De Fina, Anna. 1995. “Pronominal Choice, Identity and Solidarity in Political Discourse.” Text – Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse 15, no. 3: 379–410. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fairclough, Norman. 2003. Textual Analysis for Social Research. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman, and Ruth Wodak. 1997. “Critical Discourse Analysis.” In Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction Vol. 2 1, edited by Teun van Dijk. 258–284. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman, and Isabela Fairclough. 2012. Political Discourse Analysis. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Fetzer, Anita. 2008. “And I think that is a Very Straightforward Way of Dealing with it. The Communicative Function of Cognitive Verbs in Political Discourse.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 27, no. 4 (December): 384–396. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Flinders, Matthew. 2020. “Not a Brexit election? Pessimism, Promises and Populism UK-style.” Parliamentary Affairs, no. 1 (September): 225–42. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fuchs, Christian. 2021. “Everyday life and everyday communication in coronavirus capitalism.” In Communicating COVID-19: Everyday Life, Digital Capitalism, and Conspiracy Theories in Pandemic Times. Emerald Publishing. 17–61. DOI logo.Google Scholar
Gardelle, Laure, and Sandrine Sorlin. 2015. The Pragmatics of Personal Pronouns. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Halmari, Helena. 2008. “On the Language of the Clinton-Dole Presidential Campaign Debates. General Tendencies and Successful Strategies.” Journal of Language and Politics 7, no. 2: 247–270. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hofstede, Guy. 2001. Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions, and Organizations Across Nations, 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks: Sage.Google Scholar
Hunston, Susan. 2007. “Semantic Prosody Revisited.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 12, no. 2: 249–68. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kopytowska, Monika., and Radoslaw Krakowiak. 2020. “Online Incivility in Times of Covid-19: Social Disunity and Misperceptions of Tourism Industry in Poland.” Russian Journal of Linguistics 24, no. 4: 743–773. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Krzyżanowski, Michal and Natalia Krzyżanowska. 2022. “Narrating the ‘New Normal’ or Pre-Legitimising Media Control? Covid-19 and the Discursive Shifts in the Far-Right Imaginary of ‘Crisis’ as a Normalisation Strategy.” Discourse and Society 33, no. 6: 805–18. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Krzyżanowski, Michał, Ekman, Mattias, Nilsson, Per-Erik, Gardell, Mattias and Christian Christensen. 2021. “Uncivility, Racism, and Populism: Discourses and Interactive Practices in Anti- and Post-Democratic Communication.” Nordicom Review 42 (Special Issue): 3–15. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Krzyżanowski, Michal and Mats Ekstrom. 2022. “The Normalization of Far-Right Populism and Nativist Authoritarianism: Discursive Practices in Media, Journalism and the Wider Public Sphere/s” Discourse and Society 33, no. 6. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Krzyżanowski, Michał, and Mats Ekström. 2022. “The normalization of far-right populism and nativist authoritarianism: Discursive practices in media, journalism and the wider public sphere/s.” Discourse & Society 33 (6): 719–729. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Krämer, Benjamin, and Christina Holtz-Bacha. 2020. Perspectives on Populism and the Media: Avenues for Research. Baden-Baden: Nomos. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kroenig, Matthew. 2020. The Return of Great Power Rivalry: Democracy versus Autocracy from the Ancient World to the U.S. and China. New York: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Larina, Tatiana. 2015. “Culture-specific Communicative Styles as a Framework for Interpreting Linguistic and Cultural Idiosyncrasies.” International Review of Pragmatics 2, no. 7: 195–215. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Larina, Tatiana, Mustajoki Arto and Ekaterina Protassova. 2017. “Dimensions of Russian Culture and Mind.” In Philosophical and Cultural Interpretations of Russian Modernisation, edited by Katja Lehtisaari and Arto Mustajok. 7–19. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Larina, Tatiana and Douglas Mark Ponton. 2020. “Tact or Frankness in English and Russian Blind Peer Reviews.” Intercultural Pragmatics 4, no. 17: 471–96. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lassila, Jussi. 2018. “Putin as a Non-Populist Autocrat.” Russian Politics 3, no. 2 (June): 175–195. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Macagno, Fabrizio. 2014. “Manipulating Emotions: Value-Based Reasoning and Emotive Language.” Argumentation and Advocacy 51, no. 2: 103–22. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mamontov, Vladimir D., Tatiana M. Kozhevnikova, and Yana Y. Radyukova. 2014. “Collectivism and Individualism in Modern Russia.” Asia Social Science 10, no. 23 (November): 199–207. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Martin James, R. 2004. “Mourning: How we Get Aligned.” Discourse and Society 15, no. 2–3: 321–44. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mehta, Jayur Madhusudan, Chakrabarti Choeeta, De Leon Jessica, Homan Patricia, Skipton Tara, and Rachel Sparkman. 2023. “Assessing the Role of Collectivism and Individualism on Covid-19 Beliefs and Behaviors in the Southeastern United States.” PLoS ONE 18, no. 1 (January). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Naumov, Alexander, and Sheila Puffer. 2020. “Measuring Russian Culture using Hofstede’s Dimensions.” Applied Psychology 49, no. 4: 709–718. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pavlina, Svetlana Y. 2022. “Pragmatic and Stylistic Perspectives on British and American Covid-19 Cartoons.” Russian Journal of Linguistics 26, no. 1: 162–193. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ponton, Douglas Mark. 2021. “Never in my Life have I Heard such a Load of absolute Nonsense. Wtf.” Political Satire on the Handling of the Covid-19 Crisis”. Russian Journal of Linguistics 3, no. 25: 767–788. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ponton, Douglas Mark, Ozyumenko Vladimir and Tatiana Larina. 2023. “Lingua-Cultural Identity in Translation: ‘We’ vs ‘I’ Cultures.” Journal of Language and Education 41, no. 91: 73–84. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ponton, Douglas Mark and Davletshina, Dilyara. 2022. “Poems in Lockdown: Cultural Aspects of English and Russian Coroneologisms.” Topics in Linguistics 1, no. 23 (June): 24–38. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Purnell, Sonia. 2022. “Reality is Closing in on Boris Johnson, a Narcissist Scared of What He has Unleashed.” Accessed 12 February, 2022. [URL]
Schnepf, Julia, and Ursula Christmann. 2021. “It’s a War! It’s a Battle! It’s a Fight!: Do Militaristic Metaphors Increase People’s Threat Perceptions and Support for Covid-19 Policies?” International Journal of Psychology 57, no 1: 107–126. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tower, Rupert Kinglake, Caroline Kelly, and Anne Richards. 1997. “Individualism, collectivism and reward allocation: A cross-cultural study in Russia and Britain.” British Journal of Social Psychology 36(3): 331–345. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Van Dijk, Teun. 1993. “Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis.” Discourse and Society 4, no. 2 (April): 249–83. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2013. “Ideological Discourse Analysis.” Accessed 12 Febraury 2024. [URL]
Van Leeuwen, Theo. 1996. “The Representation of Social Actors.” In Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis, edited by Malcolm Coulthard and Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard. 32–70. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Waylen, Georgina. 2021. “Gendering Political Leadership: Hypermasculine Leadership and Covid-19.” Journal of European Public Policy 28, no. 8: 1153–73. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wierzbicka, Anna. 2003/1991. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: The Semantics of Human Interaction. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1994. Cultural Scripts: A Semantic Approach to Cultural Analysis and Cross-Cultural Communication. Pragmatics and Language Learning 51: 1–25.Google Scholar
Wilson, John. 1990. Politically Speaking: The Pragmatic Analysis of Political Language. Oxford, UK and Cambridge, Mass: BlackwellGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Nick. 2019. “When we means you: The social meaning of English pseudoinclusive personal pronouns”, in Paul Bouissac (ed), The Social Dynamics of Pronominal Systems. A comparative approach. Amsterdam, John Benjamins (ebook), DOI logo.Google Scholar
Winter Eugene, O. 1977. “A Clause-Relational Approach to English texts: A Study of Some Predictive Lexical Items in Written Discourse.” Instructional Science 6, no. 1: 1–92. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yetiskin, Ebru. 2022. “Biopolitics of “Acquired Immunity”: The War Discourse and Feminist Response-abilities in Art, Science, and Technology during Covid-19.” OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology 26, no. 10: 552–566. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zupnik, Yael-Janette. 1994. “A Pragmatic Analysis of the Use of Person Deixis in Political Discourse.” Journal of Pragmatics 21, no. 4: 339–83. DOI logoGoogle Scholar