Abstract
This study investigates the pronominal choice of the three candidates, Ma, Chen, and Wang, in the two of the five 1998 Taipei Mayoral Debates. The analysis adopts Goffman’s ‘participation framework’ to examine the first-person pronouns wo ‘I’ and women ‘we’, and the second person pronouns ni ‘you’ and nimen ‘you’ used in the two debates. The result of the study may shed light on the way that Chinese politicians use personal pronouns to reinforce involvement and manipulate participant relationships in political discourse.The quantitative analysis of the debaters’ pronominal uses reveals that there are differences between the two debates and among the three debaters. First, debater’s high frequency of ni ‘you’ in referring to the ‘addressed recipient’, their opponent(s), reflects a shift in the goal of the debate. The goal of the first debate for the debaters is to present capability or past achievement, while that of the second debate is to attack their opponent(s). Second, there are also individual differences in the pronominal choice among the three debaters. Ma’s preference for wo ‘I’ reinforces involvement with the topic in discussion. Chen’s preference for women ‘we’ expresses solidarity with the municipal government or Taipei citizens. Wang’s particular preference for second-person pronouns ni and nimen ‘you’ indicates that he tends to create involvement with the audience, i.e. the voters in Taipei.We argue that both deictic use and pragmatic functions of pronouns can serve as indications of a speaker’s involvement. We also stress that it is necessary to identify and categorize all of the instances of the pronouns used in a given text according to their pragmatic functions, so that we may comprehend the meaning and identify the referent of the pronouns. In this way, we can have a better understanding of how speakers employ personal pronouns to present themselves and establish relationship with other participants in the discourse context.