THE FORMATION OF THE LANGUAGE PORTRAIT OF AN AMERICAN BY MEANS OF PERSONAL PRONOUNS IN THE INAUGURAL ADDRESSES OF THE US PRESIDENTS

Abstract

Studying how a linguistic identity is reflected in language or speech and structuring its language portrait is of considerable interest for linguopersonology due to the anthropocentric character of modern linguistics. Political discourse has been used to model the language portraits of politicians, however, the focus of our article is the reflection of the language portrait of one of the most influential nations in the world, Americans, in political speeches. The attention is mainly paid to the verbal-semantic dimension of the language portrait in the inaugural speeches of 46 US presidents. The units forming the verbal-semantic level of the language portrait of an American are personal pronouns (79% of first-person plural pronoun, 14% of third-person singular and plural pronouns, 7% of second-person pronoun). Their correlation in inaugural speeches has demonstrated that presidents are prone to use the inclusive pronoun we/us as a means of identifying the speaker with the addressee, thus emphasizing their unity with the nation, equality of all citizens or sharing responsibility for their actions with the people (the frequency of this pronoun is much higher in the inaugural speeches of the XX and XXI centuries). There is also an increasing tendency among the presidents to use the second-person pronoun you in order to indicate US citizens as the addressees of the speech and a decreasing number of references by means of the third-person pronouns he/him, she, they/ them. The second-person pronoun mostly refers to the collective addressee – the American people, focuses the president’s appeal on the abovementioned addressee, but in several contexts has become the referent of an individual citizen. The small number of the third-person pronouns of feminine gender testifies to gender inequality in the reproduction of the language portrait of Americans. In addition, the share of third-person singular pronouns is 9 times lower than that of third-person plural, so presidents tend to represent Americans as members of certain groups rather than specific members of the nation, although such illustrations often provoke a stronger emotional response of the audience.