Chapter 3
Self-reference as an argumentative tool
Discourse by politicians and experts during the Covid-19 pandemic
In this chapter, we analyse how politicians and experts from Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain involved in
the Covid-19 crisis construct self-reference on Twitter (currently X), combining linguistic approaches to person reference and
argumentation theory. On the one hand, we show that uses are fairly similar across the three countries, in spite of the
considerable differences as to government measures concerning the pandemic. On the other hand, differences can be found
between the different professional categories. Whereas politicians mainly use self-reference to build their ethos, the experts
rather support the ethos of others. In showing how these uses contribute to building or employing ethos, we also demonstrate
that these uses can ultimately be understood as having argumentative functions on Twitter.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Theoretical background: Self-reference and argumentation
- 2.1Self-reference
- 2.2Ethos and argument
- 3.Corpus and methodology
- 4.Analysis
- 4.1Individual self-reference
- 4.2Collective self-reference
- 5.Discussion and conclusions
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Acknowledgments
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Notes
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References