"We want peace"political identity through person deixis in a Northern Irish political campaign

Resumen

The purpose of this paper is to analyse some of the uses of person deixis, as exemplified by personal pronouns, by the main Northern Irish Parties in the 2003 Assembly-election campaign. The corpus of the analysis will be a selection of 12 broadcasted TV advertisements, which we believe are representative not only of political but also of advertising communication. We suspect that in political discourse pronoun selection is frequently determined because of the pragmatic values the chosen pronouns may promote. Therefore, we hypothesise that through pronominal choice political parties can show their solidarity - or distance - with certain political identities, mainly by relying on the political opposition between "us" and "them". Moreover, pronoun selection seems to be a useful persuasive device because of the affective framework that deictics - and more specifically pronouns - can establish between both the speaker and the addressee.