Pronouns and Ideology in Newspaper Discourse

Marwah Kareem Ali, Anne Althea Christopher, Munif Zarirruddin Fikri B. Nordin

Abstract


It is a fact that the role of pronouns, especially personal pronouns, in representing socio-political ideologies is not new as it has been studied extensively in relation to political discourse. However, this role needs to be examined in the newspaper discourse. Consequently, the current paper intends to examine personal and possessive pronouns used in newspaper articles to represent socio-political ideologies. Such a study requires a critical discourse analysis (CDA) to analyse excerpts from news articles in Iraqi English newspaper, known as the Kurdish Globe (henceforth, KG), on the event of American military forces’ (henceforth, AMFs’) withdrawal from Iraq. Using a qualitative content analysis, the excerpts are categorized thematically in relation to the ideological values found in them. It is revealed that the KG newspaper made use of direct quotation of American politicians’ statements which contain plural personal and possessive pronouns when referring to their actions. This has served two aspects; firstly, it showed its objectivity in conveying the news event using quotations of newsworthy value. Secondly, it enhanced its socio-political ideologies through the direct quotations of American politicians whose government has a powerful authority over Iraq. On the one hand, the KG newspaper used personal and possessive pronouns associated with the positive representation of the U.S. government and its forces to show its trust in them. On the other hand, personal and possessive pronouns related to the Iraqi politicians were associated with negative representation to enhance its distrust in the Iraqi government.

 


Keywords


Pronouns, critical discourse analysis, socio-political ideologies, newspaper discourse, political event

Full Text:

PDF

References


Barranco, J., & Wisler, D. (1999). Validity and systematicity of newspaper data in event analysis. European Sociological Review, 15(3), 301–22.

Bello, U. (2013). “If I could make it, you too can make it!” Personal pronouns in political discourse: A CDA of president Jonathan’s presidential declaration speech. International Journal of English Linguistics, 3(6), 84–96. doi:10.5539/ijel.v3n6p84

Bramley, N. R. (2001). Pronouns of politics : The use of pronouns in the construction of “self” and “other” in political interviews (Doctoral dissertation). Australian National University, Australia.

Chilton, P. (2004). Analysing political discourse: Theory and practice. London: Routledge.

Chilton, P., & Schäffner, C. (1997). Discourse and politics. In T. A. van Dijk (Ed.), Discourse as social interaction (Vol 2., pp. 206–230). London: Sage.

De Fina, A. (1995). Pronominal choice, identity, and solidarity in political discourse. Text-Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse, 15(3), 379–410.

Duszak, A. (2002). Us and others: An introduction. In A. Duszak (Ed.), Us and others: Social identities across languages, discourses and cultures (pp. 1–28). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and social change. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Fairclough, N. (1995). Critical discourse analysis: The critical study of language. London: Addison Wesley Publishing Company.

Fairclough, N. (2001). Language and power (2nd ed.). London: Longman.

Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. London, UK: Routledge.

Fairclough, N. (2006). Semiosis, mediation and ideology: A dialectical view. In I. Lassen, J. Strunck, & T. Vestergaard (Eds.), Mediating ideology in text and image: Ten critical studies (pp. 19–35). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Franzosi, R. (1987). The press as a source of socio-historical data: Issues in the methodology of data collection from newspapers. Historical Methods, 20, 5–16.

Grigoletto, M. (2002). Personal pronouns in political discourse: Ideological implications. Crop, 8, 265–277.

Hasan, J. M. (2013). A linguistic analysis of in-group and out-group pronouns in Hosni Mubarak’s speech. Journal of Basrah Researches (Humanities Series), 38(2), 5–24.

Lee, W. (2011). Ideology in address forms: A case study of two political talk shows in Taiwan. In The 23rd North American Conference on Chinese Lingusitics (Vol. 2, pp. 133–150), Oregon, US: University of Oregon, Eugene, OR.

Mahmood, M. A., Javed, S., & Mahmood, R. (2011). A critical discourse analysis of the news headlines of budget of Pakistan FY 2011-2012. Interdisciplinary Journal of Contemporary Research in Business (IJCRB), 3(5), 120–129.

Maxwell, J. (1996). Qualitative research design: An interactive approach. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Muqit, A. (2012). Ideology and power relation reflected in the use of pronoun in Osama Bin Laden’s speech text. International Journal of Social Science and Humanity, 2(6), 557–561. doi:10.7763/IJSSH.2012.V2.171

Patton, M. Q. (2002). Qualitative evaluation and research methods (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.

Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., & Svartvik, J. (1985). A comprehensive grammar of the English language (1st ed.). London: Longman.

Richardson, J. E. (2007). Analysing newspapers: An approach from critical discourse analysis (1st ed.). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Sadeghi, B., Hassani, M. T., & Jalali, V. (2014). Towards (de-)legitimation discursive strategies in news coverage of Egyptian protest: VOA & Fars news in focus. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 98, 1580–1589. doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.03.581

Sotillo, S. M., & Wang-Gempp, J. (2004). Using corpus linguistics to investigate class, ideology, and discursive practices in online political discussions. In U. Connor & T. A. Upton (Eds.), Applied corpus linguistics: A multidimensional perspective‏‏ (pp. 91–122). Amsterdam: Rodopi.

van Dijk, T. A. (1995). Discourse analysis as ideology analysis. In C. Schäffner & A. Wenden (Eds.), Language and peace (pp. 17-33). Aldershot, UK: Dartmouth Publishing.

van Dijk, T. A. (1998). Ideology: A multidisciplinary approach (1st ed.). London: SAGE publications.

van Dijk, T. A. (2001). Critical discourse analysis. In D. Schiffin, D. Tannen, & H. Hamliton (Eds.), The handbook of discourse analysis (pp. 352–371). Oxford: Blackwell.

van Dijk, T. A. (2006a). Ideology and discourse analysis. Journal of Political Ideologies, 11(2), 115–140. doi:10.1080/13569310600687908

van Dijk, T. A. (2006b). Politics, ideology, and discourse. In The Encyclopedia of language and linguistics. Pergamon Press. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.60.110707.163600

Wales, K. (1996). Personal pronoun in present-day English. Cambridge, Great Britain: Cambridge University Press.

Wilson, J. (1990). Politically speaking: The pragmatic analysis of political language. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Wodak, R. (2001). What CDA is about – a summary of its history, important concepts and its developments. In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of critical discourse analysis (pp. 1–13). London: Sage.

Youssefi, K., Kanani, A. B., & Shojaei, A. (2013). Ideological or international move? A critical discourse analysis toward the representation of Iran sanctions in Western printed media. Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 4(6), 1343–1350. doi:10.4304/jltr.4.6.1343-1350

Zhang, Y., & Wildemuth, B. M. (2009). Qualitative analysis of content. In B. Wildemuth (Ed.), Applications of social research methods to questions in information and library science (pp. 308–319). Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.




DOI: https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.6n.3p.168

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Bookmark and Share


Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

2012-2023 (CC-BY) Australian International Academic Centre PTY.LTD. 

International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature

To make sure that you can receive messages from us, please add the journal emails into your e-mail 'safe list'. If you do not receive e-mail in your 'inbox', check your 'bulk mail' or 'junk mail' folders.