Topics in Linguistics - Issue 9 – September 2012 – Approaches to Text and Discourse Analysis
Constructing Digital Rhetorical Spaces
in Twitter: A Case-Study of
@BarackObama (
)
Alcina Sousa, Anna Ivanova
Alcina Sousa
University of Madeira, Portugal
Anna Ivanova
University of Seville, Spain - University of Madeira, Portugal
Abstract
The present article focuses on the way social sites construct rhetorical
spaces within the political domain by uncovering discursive strategies
which mark the moves between local/national and global communication in
Obama’s Twitter. Having deixis at the core of this research study, of
exploratory nature, has allowed for the reassessment of discursive
strategies in the digital space of online communication across the globe,
thereby addressing the collective (national and global) / individual as well
as a diffuse target audience.
A discourse-based view drawing on corpus linguistics (McCarthy & Carter
1994; Sampson & McCarthy 2004; Sinclair 2004; Baker 2006) has
benefitted from the perspectives shared by an interdisciplinary approach,
namely linguistics and rhetoric (Harriman 1995; Aunte 2008) so as to
understand political communication in new social media (Golbeck et al.
2010; Tumasjan et al. 2010) involving the interpersonal function,
particularly in the way computer-mediated written production can involve
the target audience emotionally and cognitively so as to inculcate a point of
view.
For the attainment of this goal, the paper departs from a corpus analysis of
deictic items and reference chains in 1094 tweets (totalling 20,466 words),
collected from January 2009 to May 2011, corresponding to Obama’s
governing period. Among the deictic items under scrutiny, stand out
personal reference (i.e., we / you / they), demonstratives and locatives,
particularly, time and space anchors, like now and binaries here / there.
These seem to play a role in reconfiguring or disambiguating local and
global rhetorical spaces thereby (dis)connecting the addressees with the message of political kind. By studying the
selected corpus, this paper intends to (i) single out and categorize the occurrence of the aforementioned deictic
items in Obama’s Twitter (ii) contrast them with the ones occurring in the American National Corpus, the corpus of
political speeches, and the Twitter Corpus (Zappavigna, 2011).; and (iii) analyse the way they are disambiguated at
the textual level so as to discuss the way Barack Obama shapes his digital rhetorical space across contexts. For a
more comprehensive display and analysis of their context of occurrence, and thus discussing the way semantic
prosody is realized (Sinclair 1991, 2004, Louw 1993 in Sampson and McCarthy 2004, Stubbs 1995, Hunston 1997),
this study resorted to a WordSmith v. 5 tool, after having turned the collected tweets into the digital format (saved
as .txt file).
The obtained results evidence a large occurrence of deictic references in the corpus. They show ambiguity at the
discourse level thereby requiring a close inspection of the collocational meaning and reference chain across tweets
so as to come up with patterns of collocation and categories. This might lead to understanding Obama’s Twitter as
a rhetorical digital platform constructed without distinguished personal, time or space boundaries in global and
intercultural context as a way to involve the broadest audience possible. Hence, Obama’s mixed-referencing in
addressing the virtual audience has shed some light on the way new media reconfigure emerging democracies
around the globe. As for the limits of this study, it is also important to flash out the issues which are related to
communication and the virtual conditions and constraints of communicating in Twitter as well as other issues worth
studying but beyond the scope of this research paper. .
Keywords
Corpus linguistics, empirical methods, Web-as-corpus, discourse analysis, Internet linguistics
Nowadays, politicians use global network on a regular
basis creating personal web pages and registering on
different social platforms. One of the best examples in
the modern political scenario is the 44th President of the
United States, Barack Obama, who was a pioneer in
demonstrating the potential of the Internet for political
communication, and thus, was called “the first Internet
president“ according to Greengard (2009, p. 16).
Previous research into Obama’s use of the Internet
dealt mostly with its social dimension stating that:
The campaign’s new-media strategy, inspired by
popular social networks like MySpace and Facebook,
has revolutionized the use of the Web as a political tool,
helping the candidate raise more than two million
Introduction
Political communication in the 21st century has firmly
established itself not only in the traditional media such
as TV or radio, but also in the Internet. As Hansen and
Benoit (2005, p. 219) state:
Candidates vying for the office of president use a
variety of communication media to disseminate
information to the public, including television, radio,
and newspaper ads and stump speeches, debates, and
direct mail brochures. The Internet is one of the newest
communication media being used by candidates
seeking election to the highest office in the land. Web
pages are now standard accouterments of the modern
political campaign.
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Topics in Linguistics - Issue 9 – September 2012 – Approaches to Text and Discourse Analysis
approach
and
impossible
to
understand
the
determinants of his rhetorical choices”.
As a matter of fact, Elahi and Cos (2005), for example,
studied Obama’s 2004 address simply focusing on
hope and unity as key concepts of his speech drawing
on the use of his personal narrative. Rowland and Jones
(2007) also focused on hope and unity in Obama’s
2004 address. The latter argued that it was Obama’s
attempt to recast the American dream by means of a
hopeful vision for the country based on shared identity.
Frank (2009), in his turn, concentrated on Obama’s
emphasis on religious themes, while Murphy (2009)
looked at Obama’s discussion of the economic crisis by
illustrating his view on the American economic situation
as a constituent part of a broader historical
progression.
Apart from the aforementioned research studies on
Obama’s individual speeches, Coe and Reitzes (2010)
carried out an analysis of Obama’s rhetoric over the
course of 2008 election campaign. Building their study
on a computer-assisted content analysis, of exploratory
kind, the authors flashed out four main rhetorical
appeals in Obama’s 2008 campaign, briefly pinpointed
as follows: “policy”, “thematic”, “morality” and
“factious”; in which policy and thematic appeals had a
greater percentage of use over morality and factious7.
Each of these appeals was then subdivided into
different categories, thus, the final list comprised 18
categories constituting four rhetorical appeals. What is
interesting in their approach is that the four categories
of appeals were singled out, or decided upon by the
authors prior to the study of the corpus. In other
words, first, the appeals were named; second, the
corpus was searched for the lexical choice which could
fall under one of them 8 . Finally, Coe and Reizes
concluded that Obama’s rhetoric during the 2008
campaign “varied by speaking context, geography and
poll position, indicating a twofold rhetorical approach
of emphasizing policy and thematic appeals while
downplaying more contentious issues” (Coe & Reitzes,
2010, p. 391). Briefly put, location and context of
speaking were the main determinants of Obama’s
rhetoric, and, thus, his speeches were “modified from
day to day […] to reflect the concerns and interests of
the particular audience and also to reflect a changing
major theme of the day” (Abramson, Aldrich, & Rohde,
2007, p. 43). These findings come in the same line as
Zarefsky’s claim (2004, p. 608) that the field of
rhetorical studies “emphasizes contingency and choice
rather than predictability and control”. Hence, the
rhetor, tagging along Mountford (2001, p. 41), meaning
the speaker or writer chooses the best way to achieve
their goal in the context of specific situation bearing an
audience in mind. This situation is also referred to as
“situatedness”, “rhetorical situation”, or sometimes
“rhetorical space”.
donations of less than $200 each and swiftly mobilize
hundreds of thousands of supporters before various
primaries. (Stelter, 2008, p. 1)
This study intends to expand previous research on
Obama’s use of digital media by applying the concept
of rhetorical space to uncover discursive strategies
which mark the moves between local/national and
global communication in Obama’s Twitter. Further on,
having deixis at the core of this research study, of
exploratory nature, has allowed for the reassessment of
discursive strategies in the digital space of online
communication across the globe, thereby addressing
the collective (national and global) / individual as well
as a diffuse target audience.
A discourse-based view drawing on corpus linguistics
(McCarthy & Carter, 1994; Sampson & McCarthy, 2004;
Sinclair, 2004; Baker, 2006) has benefitted from the
perspectives shared by an interdisciplinary approach,
namely linguistics and rhetoric (Harriman, 1995; Aunte,
2008) so as to understand political communication in
new social media (Golbeck et al., 2010; Tumasjan et al.,
2010) involving the interpersonal function, particularly
in the way computer-mediated written production can
involve the target audience emotionally and cognitively
so as to inculcate a point of view of the addressee.
Thus, the present study undertakes an innovative
approach to the analysis of rhetorical spaces online.
Using the combination of linguistic and rhetorical
studies, the article intends to demonstrate the benefits
of this symbiosis for the research community. The
central place in this approach takes the notion of
deixis, which is claimed to be the main component in
the construction of Obama’s digital rhetorical space.
The corpus analysis of deictic references, as well as
their collocation patterns, is believed to shed light on
“hidden” agenda in the president’s own rhetoric,
underpinning, thus, his intentions in the construction of
special rhetorical space on his Twitter platform.
Literature review
Presidential rhetoric: the case of Barack Obama
There are several studies on presidential rhetoric, some
of which in the belief to describe what the presidency is
about (Windt, 1984; Zarefsky, 2004; Medhurst, 2008).
Zarefsky (2004), for instance, suggests that rhetoric “is
a reflection of a president’s values and world view”
(Zarefsky, 2004, p. 610), and that it defines political
reality. It was not until the 1980s that academic
research began to recognize and express a specific
interest in the presidency and in presidential rhetoric.
This is due to the publication, “Presidential Rhetoric:
Definition of a Field of Study”, by Theodore Otto Windt
Jr. in the Central States Speech Journal (1984) in which
he identified presidential rhetoric as a distinct subfield
within the discipline of rhetoric, of which American
rhetorical tradition has been under research focus for a
long time (Brake, 1969; Windt, 1984; Lucas, 1988;
Zarefsky, 1986; etc).
The first Afro-American elected to preside in the White
House, Barack Obama, also became famous for his
outrageous rhetorical skills and in Coe and Reitzes’
bearings (2010, p. 391): “It was a speech that
transformed Obama from little-known state senator into
a nationally known political celebrity”. The importance
of the public address to his political life gave rise to a
number of studies of Obama’s rhetorical techniques,
namely those by Elahi and Cos (2005); Rowland and
Jones (2007); Frank (2009); Murphy (2009); Coe and
Reitzes (2010), to name but a few. However, it is
surprising to note that most of this scholarly studies
concentrated mainly on the analysis of Obama’s single
speeches on specific domains, making it difficult to
explore and, drawing on the claims by Coe and Reitzes
(2010, p. 391), “generalize about Obama’s rhetorical
Rhetorical space
Referring to Aristotle’s postulates, Zarefsky (2004, p.
610) posits: “Aristotle defined rhetoric as the faculty of
discovering the available means of persuasion in the
given case. Those last four words emphasize that
rhetoric is situational; it is grounded in particulars and
resists easy generalization”. Similarly, Beasley (2006, p.
5) suggests that “one of the most important
characteristics of all rhetoric is its “situatedness”. This
characteristic is often associated with Bitzer’s (1980)
Policy appeals: 58.94 uses per 1,000 words; thematic
appeals: 41.93; morality appeals: 6.73; factious
appeals: 2.62
8
This information was confirmed through the private
correspondence between Kevin Coe and Anna Ivanova.
7
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Topics in Linguistics - Issue 9 – September 2012 – Approaches to Text and Discourse Analysis
speakers’ viewpoints” (Simpson, 1993, p. 13). This view
was supported by Levinson (1983, p. 55) who claimed
that:
Deixis belongs within the domain of pragmatics
because it directly concerns the relationship between
the structure of language and the contexts in which
they are used.
Similarly to this viewpoint, Zupnik (1994, p. 340) calls
deixis “a pragmatic phenomenon”, explaining it through
“the relationship between the structure of languages
and the contexts in which they are used.” Bühler
(1982b) distinguishes between three dimensions (or,
according to Fillmore, 1997, sub-categories) of deixis:
personal, local, and temporal.
Personal deixis stands for “the identity of the
interlocutors in a communication situation” (Fillmore,
1997, p. 61-62). It “allows distinction among the
speaker, the addressee, and everyone elese” (Trask,
1999, p. 68) such as:
speaker - the sender of the message what grammarians
call “first person”;
addressee – the message’s intended recipient, or
“second person”;
audience – intended audience, a person who may be
considered part of the conversational group but who is
not a member of the speaker / addressee pair.
Local deixis, also called place or spatial deixis, is “the
linguistic expression of the speaker’s perception of his
position in three-dimensional space” (Fillmore, 1997, p.
27). It denotes “the relationship of objects to a
speaker”, or “how a speaker is situated in physical
space” (Simpson, 1993, p. 13).
Temporal (or time) deixis, “concerns the ways in which
the time of the events referred to in an utterance
(reference time - mine) interacts with the time of the
utterance itself (encoding time - mine)” (Simpson, 1993,
p. 13), and the time when the message was received
(decoding time – mine) (Fillmore, 1997). Thus, person,
time and place are the three “major grammaticalized
types of deixis” (Fillmore, 1997, p. 17).
In speech / writing deixis is realized through the use of
special “linguistic pointers” (Werth, 1994) called deictic
expressions, also classified as “indexical symbols”
(Peirce in Burks, 1949) “indexical expressions”
(Adentunji, 2006), “shifters” (Jacobson, 1957), or
“textual references” (Halliday & Hasan, 1976). Their
referents cannot be identified without an understanding
of their actual context (Zupnik, 1994). In the case of
personal deixis, its indexical items belong to the
grammatical category of personal pronouns, such as I,
you, we, etc., and their variants my, mine, your, our,
etc. The most obvious local deictic terms are conveyed
by the adverbs here / there and the demonstratives this
/ these and that / those, which are “the purest
indicators of directionality and location” (Simpson,
1993, p. 13). The first words in each pair indicate
proximal perspective as they express physical proximity
to the speaker. On the contrary, the second sets of
words take a distal perspective as they denote a certain
distance from the location of the speaker. The same
proximal / distal distinction is applied to the deictic
adverbs of time now and then. The deictic now reflects
proximal perspective meaning “at the time at which the
speaker is speaking”, while its distal pair then “indicates
that the events referred to took place at a time anterior
to the time of speaking” (Simpson, 1993, p. 14).
The resolving of deictic expressions is performed by
means of deictic anchorage, the term introduced by the
Norwegian psychologist Ragnar Rommetveit in 1968. It
consists in the contextualization of a deictic item
through the establishing of cohesive ties between this
item and the context in which it is used, as Lenz (2003,
p. VII) puts it: “whenever the deictic is employed, the
speaker refers to a certain entity”. Concerning the
notion of rhetorical situation, defined as "a natural
context of persons, events, objects9, relations, and an
exigency which strongly invites utterance". In its turn,
the term rhetorical situation is applied by rhetoricians
to recognize the definition of rhetorical space,
suggested by the feminist philosopher Lorraine Code,
back in 1995. By resorting to the example of women’s
attempt to have “productive public debate about
abortion in Vatican in 1995”, Code (1995. p. x) noted
that “the very possibility of an utterance counting as
“true-or-false” or of a discussion yielding insight”
depends on one’s location”. This claim goes back to
Aristotle’s stance who suggested that “a rhetor must
modulate his speech for the old, the young, and the
middle-aged, groups whose habits of mind create an
exigency that must be accounted for in the invention
process” (Mountford, 2001, p. 41). Hence, Code (1995,
pp. ix-x) named this phenomenon a rhetorical space by
defining it as:
fictive but not fanciful or fixed locations, whose (tacit,
rarely spoken) territorial imperatives structure and limit
the kinds of utterances that can be voiced within them
with a reasonable
expectation of uptake and “choral support”: an
expectation of being heard, understood, taken
seriously”. [adapted mine]
Having this in mind, one can draw a parallel line
between rhetorical space in Rhetorical Studies and
discourse in Linguistics, the latter one defined as “a
combination of text and its relevant context” (Werth,
1999, p. 47). For a clear understanding of the
preceding phrase, it is relevant to point out that a text
refers to both oral and written discourse. In the first
case, it takes the form of transcription of speeches,
which are normally used for this type of studies.
Interestingly, a text in presidential rhetoric “refers not
only to the words the president speaks but to the
entirety of the presidential performance” (Zarefsky,
2004, p. 609). In short, it’s a language event, i.e.
language together with the context that supports it.
This relevant context, or as it is also called, common
ground, expresses the same idea as “situatedness” in
rhetorical space. The crucial point here is that previous
research in rhetorical space concentrated on how
“situatedness” defined, or shaped the rhetor’s
(speaker’s or writer’s) actions in a certain situation. The
opposite view on this issue was covered by Werth in his
study of conceptual space in discourse. First of all, he
defines discourse as (Werth, 1999, p. 51): “a deliberate
and joint effort on the part of a producer and recipients
to build up a “world” within which the propositions
advanced are coherent and make complete sense”.
Secondly, as it goes from the above definition, Werth’s
approach to study discourse revolves around the term
text world, defined as (Werth, 1999, p. 51) “a deictic
space, defined initially by the discourse itself, and
specifically by the deictic and referential elements in it.”
These elements, or deictic subset, denote personal,
locative and temporal features of language encoding in
the context of utterance. Moreover, this frame of deictic
and reference items is believed to form “situatedness”
in the speaker’s / writer’s rhetorical space.
Deixis and rhetorical space
The term deixis “refers to the way speakers orient
themselves and their listeners in terms of person, time
and space in relation to the immediate situation of
speaking” (McCarthy & Carter, 1994, p. 178). It can be
characterized as “orientational” features of language
which function to locate utterances in relation to
By "objects" Bitzer (1980) has in mind "documents,"
rather than elements of a physical location (8).
9
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Topics in Linguistics - Issue 9 – September 2012 – Approaches to Text and Discourse Analysis
research scope of this study, it is worth mentioning, if
only briefly, the role of deixis in political studies.
responsibility, and the fear of being misinterpreted, by
the audience or co-debater” (Adentunji, 2006, p. 182).
In 2004, Íñigo-Mora published a paper in which she
studied the strategic use of the first person plural
pronouns (we, our, us) during five “Question Time
Sessions” in the House of Commons (British Parliament)
that took place between 1st December 1987 and 19th
April 1988.
She
distinguished
four
indexical
meanings
demonstrating “an approaching-distancing relationship,
depending on the politician’s purpose” (Íñigo-Mora,
2004, p. 49):
1)
exclusive: I + my political group;
2)
inclusive: I + you;
3)
parliamentary community: I + parliamentary
community;
4)
generic: I + all British people.
A similar approach was carried out in the study of
personal deixis in Spanish political-electoral debate
between Felipe Conzález and José María Aznar during
the 1993 general elections (Arroyo, 2000). As a result,
the author distinguishes two major personal deictic
references: the presidential I and the partisan we:
“The presidential I distinguishes the speaker as the
head of the ideological option that he represents and
also gives him added weight as a social and political
leader”
“[partisan we] in which the other members of the same
political side participate with the candidate” (Arroyo,
2000, p. 7-8)
Apart from the aforementioned studies on personal
deixis in political discourse, time and space deictic
references have also been under the research scope.
For example, Adetunji (2006) in his paper on Olusegun
Obasanjo’s speeches, turns his attention to personal,
temporal and spatial deictic anchorage. Likewise, in
Billig’s (1995) study the deictic references I, you, we,
here, and now are defined as those creating what Billig
calls “banal nationalism.” He argues that although these
subtle (“banal”) words do not deliver an obvious
message, they serve to create a background for and
“flag” nationalism.
Deixis and political discourse studies
Deixis has been attracting the attention of political
discourse scholars for a quite time now. It has been
studied “ranging from personal to political, from
persuasive to manipulative”, taking into account “both
the context of production and the speaker’s intentions”
(Adetunji, 2006, p. 181). As a matter of fact, the major
number of these studies is devoted to the use of person
deixis by politicians. More precisely, their focus is on
the role of first-person plural deictic pronouns. Thus, it
has been argued that they may play a powerful
persuasive role “since they have the potential to encode
group memberships and identifications” (Zupnik, 1994,
p. 340) by indexing different groups as included or
excluded in the pronoun we (Seidel, 1975; ConnorLinton, 1988; Fairclough, 1989; Wilson, 1990).
Thereupon, Zupnik (1994) points out the crucial role in
the analysis of vague deixis using the example of one
interlocutor’s responses in a televised political speech
event. She argues that “based on the cohesive ties
among the various utterances of the discourse, there
are several potential referents of the indexicals” and
“hearers may choose to include themselves as members
of the class of referents” (Zupnik, 1994, p. 340). Thus,
it may facilitate the achievement “of the main goal of
political speech: to persuade listeners of the speaker’s
viewpoint” (Zupnik, 1994, p. 340).
The problem of inclusion / exclusion of personal deictic
pronouns in political discourse has been fully covered
by Rees (1983) in his pronominal scale:
0
I
1
ME
2
YOU
(direct)
3
ONE
4
YOU
5
6
IT
SHE
(indefinite)
7
HE
8
THEY
Table 1. Pronominal scale for political referencing by
Rees (Rees, 1983, p. 16)
Starting with the deictic centre I and finishing with the
distant they, this scale shows “the movement from the
proximal to the distal” (Adentunji, 2006, p. 180) in the
use of pronominal references in political context. In his
study of speeches by Casper Weinberger (former United
States Defense Secretary), Urban (1988) focuses on the
use of the first-person plural pronoun we. As Arroyo
(2000, p. 4) puts it: “the ambiguous use of pronominal
deixis is especially relevant in political language”. Thus,
Urban isolates six different uses of we by Weinberger
(Urban, 1988, p. 8-9):
1)
the President -we ;
2)
the Department of Defense - we;
3)
the Reagan Administration - we;
4)
the U.S. government - we;
5)
the United States -we;
6)
the U.S. and the Soviet Union - we.
Similarly, Maitland Wilson (1987) has investigated the
use of personal pronouns in the speeches of three
different British political leaders (M. Foot, N. Kinnock
and M. Thatcher) with the object of “self-referencing”,
“relation of contrast” and “other referencing”. Their
results showed obvious similarity in the use of deictic
pronominals between Kinnock and Foot (Labour Party
leaders) and differences between Kinnock/Foot and
Thatcher
(Conservative
Party
leader), who
is
characterized to use the inclusive we, putting the
people, the government, and herself in the same boat
(Fairclough, 2003).
Later on, in 1990, Wilson in his study of the United
States presidential debates between Gerald Ford and
Jimmy Carter in 1976 analyzes the shifting status of I
and we. He concludes by anchoring it “on selfpositioning the desire to spread the load of
Data and methodology
The present study departs from a corpus analysis of
deictic items and reference chains in 1094 tweets, the
Tweet-Obama corpus (totalling 20,466 words), collected
from January 2009 to May 2011, corresponding to
Obama’s governing period. Among the deictic items
under scrutiny, stand out personal references (i.e., we /
you / they), demonstratives and locatives, particularly,
time and space anchors, like binaries now / then, and
here / there. These seem to play a role in reconfiguring
or disambiguating local and global rhetorical spaces
thereby (dis)connecting the addressees with the
message of political kind.
By studying the selected corpus, this paper intends to
(i) single out and categorize the occurrence of the
aforementioned deictic items in Obama’s Twitter; and
(ii) analyse the way they are disambiguated at the
textual level so as to discuss the way Barack Obama
shapes his digital rhetorical space across contexts. For
a more comprehensive display and analysis of their
context of occurrence, and thus discussing the way
semantic prosody is realized (Sinclair, 1991, 2004,
Louw, 1993 in Sampson & McCarthy, 2004, Stubbs,
1995, Hunston, 2007), this study resorted to a
WordSmith v. 5 tool, after having turned the collected
tweets into the digital format (saved as txt file). Mainly,
the wordlist and concordance options were used to: (i)
select the items under the study; and (ii) look for their
deictic anchorage in the corpus. Having fulfilled this
task, the deictic references were then grouped
according to their antecedents in the corpus.
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Topics in Linguistics - Issue 9 – September 2012 – Approaches to Text and Discourse Analysis
2)
exclusive;
3)
multiple-indexing.
These groups are further divided into subcategories
according to their implied participating bodies as
demonstrated in Table 4:
Findings
Personal deixis
The first set of analyses focuses on personal deixis in
Obama’s selected corpus. For this purpose, the
pronominal forms including possessive adjectives in a
total of 13 unique words out of 894 tokens were
selected from the general corpus wordlist (19,908). The
forms were then organized according to the syntactic
function, person, number and gender, in case of the
first and third pronominal references, as displayed in
Table 1.
Group
Subcategories
x
Obama + Nation (I-ON)
x
Generic (I-G)
x
Obama + his cabinet (EOC)
Exclusive
x
Obama + US government
(E-OG)
x
Obama + his family (E-OF)
Multiplex
Obama + (?)Nation +
indexing
(?)Government (A-ONG)
Table 4. Classification of the first person plural deictic
items in Obama’s Corpus
Inclusive
Plural
ourselves
N=1
Poss.
adj
our
N=188
Poss.
pron
ours
N= 1
themselves
N=2
their
N=42
-
Subject
Object
Reflexive
we
N=238
us
N=35
they
N=42
them
N=34
1)
Inclusive group of the first person pronouns
seems to include a possible reader into the discourse:
a)
as a part of the American nation (I-ON):
“America prevailed because we chose to move forward
as one nation. Again, we are tested. And again we must
answer history’s call.”
b)
on a general basis (I-G):
“We’re putting Americans to work producing clean
energy that will lower our reliance on foreign oil and
protect our planet.”
2)
Whereas in exclusive group deictic pronouns
stand for the speaker and/or other entities excluding
the hearer from the discourse act. Instead, they refer
to:
a)
the president and/or his cabinet (E-OC):
“We will continue to work hand in hand with state &
local authorities on every front until we put this tragic
ordeal in the Gulf behind us. “
b)
the president (and/or his cabinet), and the
government (E-OG):
“I am proposing that starting this year, we freeze
annual domestic spending for the next five years.”
c)
the president and his family (E-OF):
“Michelle and I cast our ballots early.”
3)
Finally, in the “multiple-indexing” group
(Adetunji, 2006) plural deictic forms are fuzzy and
ambiguous while binding them to the intended
antecedent element. Consider the following examples:
“We are not going back - we are moving forward.”
With respect to their participant roles in the discourse,
the above “multiple-indexing” deictic we can be
anchored to Obama, the American government, the
Americans or even a supra-national audience with equal
success. Due to the restricted space of the textual
component in Twitter (140 characters), the supporting
context in this sort of tweets does not provide much
help in retrieving the implied reference, which is, thus,
assigned as ambiguous, or as Adetunji (2006) calls it –
“multiple-indexing”.
Interestingly, frequency data of the 1st plural
pronominal elements (see Diagram 1) shows nearly
equal distribution of inclusive and multiple-indexing
groups in the Tweet-Obama corpus, where the first one
occurs 152 times, and the second – 170 (168+2) times
respectively. Further on, the results from Diagram 2
indicate a clear trend in the use of we as an ambiguous
(MI=91) and exclusive (E-OG=60; E-OC=42) reference in
the corpus vs. an inclusive one (I-ON=45). Similar
results are also obtained for the pronoun us with major
references of multiple-indexing and Obama + his
cabinet, thus, excluding the potential audience from
the discourse. Contrary to this, the occurrences of the
inclusive our (I-ON=110) prevails over its exclusive (EOG=13; E-OC=12) and ambiguous (MI=50) instances.
Table 2. Personal pronouns selected from Obama’s
Corpus (instances in corpus)
The sort of occurrences of the 2nd person reference as
presented in Table 2 only points to its syntactic form,
either as a personal pronoun (subject or object) or as a
possessive adjective because the category of number is
reported (Quirk et al., 1990, p. 343) as “neutralized in
current standard English”. Yet, there are a couple of
instances in the TweetObama corpus co-collocating
with “guys”. Irrespective of the necessary pragmalinguistic analysis to be presented further on, the
overriding occurrence of the plural form of the
pronoun, the term of address “you guys”, explicitly
targeted at the larger audience by the speaker / writer,
chiefly stands for a North American and Australian
collocation of the informal 2nd person plural form (cf.
1.190.000.000 Google entries).
Poss.
pron
you
you
your
yours
N=111
N=60
N=137
N=3
Table 3. Second person pronouns selected from
Obama’s Corpus (instances in corpus)
Subject
Object
Poss. adj
It is thus somehow evidenced from both tables that the
set of the 1st person references is more frequent than
the other two sets: 2nd and 3rd person reference.
The results for each set of items are presented below in
separate sections followed by the discussion of their
semantic prosody underpinning point of view, implied
public /collective and individual stances, as they occur
in strings, as well as their collocational meaning in
utterances.
Personal deictic we
The plural deictic pronouns / adjectives are not only the
most frequent in the corpus, but they are also fully
deployed in all their possible forms: we, us, our, ours
and ourselves (see Table 2). However, there is a
potential ambiguity of assigning participant roles to
these deictic items. The сlose reading of the strings and
larger units (tweets) is employed to determine the
linguistic environment of the deictic items under
scrutiny. It consists in tracking down the reference
chains in order to restore the corresponding antecedent
elements for each deictic pronoun/adjective. Thus,
three main groups of the first plural pronominals are
defined based on the implied exclusiveness /
inclusiveness of the possible audience:
1)
inclusive;
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Topics in Linguistics - Issue 9 – September 2012 – Approaches to Text and Discourse Analysis
items (tweets) is done, and accordingly, there are four
main categories of the 3rd person plural forms in the
corpus as it is demonstrated in Table 5:
153
Multiple-indexing
1
Exclusive
Inclusive
2
E-OF
50
E-OC
100
E-OG
150
General
200
I-ON
Diagram 1. Frequency distribution of the groups for the
1st person plural pronominal items in the Tweet-Obama
corpus.
150
110
100
50
91
60
4542
50
13 12
2
12 1310
0
we
MI
E-OG
our
I-ON
E-OC
us
E-OF
Example from
the TweetObama corpus
Frequency in
the TweetObama
corpus
Americans who
are fighting to
find good jobs
and support
USA, i.e. the
54%
their families will
Americans
get the support
they need during
these tough
economic times.
If the other side
wins, they’ll try
their hardest to
give free rein
back to
Opposition
19%
insurance
companies,
credit card
companies &
Wall St. banks.
Supporters are
fired up. They’ve
reached out to
500,000 voters
15%
Supporters
so far—keep
calling, and keep
knocking.
It’s time to hold
the big banks
accountable to
Other
the people they
12%
serve. Show your
support for Wall
Street reform.
Table 5. Categories of the deictic 3rd person plural
forms in the Tweet-Obama corpus.
168
0
MI
Category of
3rd person
plural in the
Tweet-Obama
corpus
64
73
General
Diagram 2. Frequency distribution of the groups for
personal pronouns we, our and us in the Tweet-Obama
corpus
Personal deictic you
The group of the 2nd person pronouns is also highly
representative in the Tweet-Obama corpus (cf. Table 3)
you as a subject occurs 111 times; as an object – 60
times; as a possessive adjective – 137 times; and as a
possessive pronoun – 3 times. The close reading of the
tweets indicates their inclusive character (regardless of
their form and syntactic function), i.e. directed to the
potential reader of Obama’s Twitter evidenced in this
interrogative statement:
“How many of your friends can you inspire to commit to
vote this November?” (subject)
Despite of the neutralized category of number for this
group of pronominal references, the corpus reveals two
instances of their clear use in plural sense. Each of
these instances comes accompanied by a co-collocation
“guys”, typical for North American and Australian
English of the informal second person plural form, in:
“You guys give me confidence. You guys give me hope.”
This table illustrates that the plural deictic forms of the
3rd person pronouns are anchored to the Americans in
most of their occurrences in the corpus (54%). They and
its forms is also referred to the opposition (19%),
supporters (15%) and other participating bodies (12%).
It is also observed that the major part of these forms
also belong to anaphoric use except for 2.5% of times
(3 times of all 3rd person plural) which are used
cataphorically, and one stance that is not possible to
define due to a zero antecedent:
“We measure progress by the success of our people. By
the jobs they can find and the quality of life those jobs
offer.” (they used in anaphoric position)
“For the character they build, the doors they open, and
the love they provide, our fathers deserve our unending
appreciation and admiration.” (they used in cataphoric
position)
“With gratitude for the lives they led: L” (impossible to
define the antecedent)
Personal deictic they
Finally, the deictic pronominal reference they is
characterized by the exclusive character, i.e. it does not
explicitly include a possible reader of Obama’s Twitter,
and is directed to/speak about “third parties” – those,
“not directly involved in the origination or reception of
the utterance in which they occur” (Quirk, 1990, p.
340): politicians, companies, state issues, reforms, etc.
The deictic they is represented in the corpus by the
subject form they 42 times, by the object form them 34
times, by the possessive adjective their 42 times and by
reflexive themselves twice (cf. Table 1). In order to
assess the implied antecedents of this deictic group, a
close reading of the concordance strings and larger
Spatial deixis
The second set of analyses deals with the spatial (or
local) deictic references based on two-level “distance”
criteria with the speaker as a referent point: distal vs.
proximal, where the proximal level is considered to be
much closer to the speaker and the distal one – closer
to the addressee (Quirck & Greenbaum, 1991):
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Topics in Linguistics - Issue 9 – September 2012 – Approaches to Text and Discourse Analysis
DISTAL
that
those
there
The first category of spatial deictic references stands
for the items that reflect the general situational context
of communication, mainly:
(i) speaker’s / hearer’s tacit knowledge on a shared
topic mediated by the demonstratives this / these: this
decision; these photos; this administration; Please read
this—Vicki Kennedy says it's time to pass H and finish
the work of her late husband's life;
(ii) speaker’s physical location mediated by the place
adverb here: I've come here to Cairo to seek a new
beginning between the United States and Muslims.
The locative deictic items in the communicative
category refer to a supra-textual content (e.g. video,
link, etc.): this link, this video, this account, you can
watch online here, etc. In this case, the speaker
explicitly prompts a hearer to perform an action that
lies beyond reading the textual component: check out a
link, video or another Twitter account, etc.
The third category of proximal locative deixis indicates
the time reference. It is presented only by the
demonstratives this / these, and its description is given
in the corresponding section for time deixis.
Finally, the indefinite group includes all those cases
where it is not possible to clearly define the referent
item of the deictic this / these and here:
“This was never just about putting a president in the
White House. It was about building a movement for
change that endures.”
PROXIMAL
this
these
here
SPEAKER
Picture 1. Proximal-distal criteria for the spatial deixis
classification in the Tweet-Obama corpus
For this purpose the following set of deictic
demonstratives and adverbs of place was selected from
the corpus:
Proximal
Distal
this
that
N=184
N=11
these
those
N=7
N=24
here
there
N=35
N=7
Total: 226
Total: 42
Table 6. Two-way levels of spatial demonstratives and
adverbs in the Tweet-Obama Corpus
Distal level of spatial deixis: that / those and there
Distal spatial deictic items under the scope in the
Tweet-Obama corpus are the demonstrative pronouns
that (N=11) / those (N=24) and the adverb of place
there (N=7). Regarding quantitative data in the previous
section (Table 1), these items occur nearly five times
less in the corpus than do proximal ones. Thus,
applying close reading method of the concordance
strings and larger units (i.e. tweets), distal spatial
deictic items in the Tweet-Obama corpus can be subdivided into the following categories:
1.
situational;
2.
indefinite.
The quantitative analysis in the whole corpus places
situational category (N=40) in the forefront as the most
representative one by both the demonstratives that /
those and locative adverb there. On the contrary, the
indefinite (N=2) category is represented only by the
distal locative there:
The selected spatial deictic references are detected to
occur in cataphoric or anaphoric position to the
indicated item in the corpus:
VP Biden spent time Wednesday debunking myths on
seniors & health reform. Share this with a senior in your
life.
Proximal level of spatial deixis: this / these and here
The results shown in Table 6 report a (a) five times
quantitative advantage of proximal deictic items over
the distal ones. The close reading of concordance
strings together with larger units (i.e. tweets) points out
four main categories for proximal deictic items
according to their main references in the corpus:
1.
situational;
2.
communicative;
3.
time;
4.
indefinite.
The quantitative analysis obtained for each category
indicates that the major number of proximal deictics
occurs with time (N=98) and situational (N=68)
referents,
followed
by
indefinite
(N=30)
and
communicative (N=30) ones:
Time
Situational
Indefinite
30
Communicative
30
0
50
10
20
30
40
50
Diagram 4. Quantitative distribution of categories for
distal spatial deictic items in the Tweet-Obama corpus
68
Indefinite
2
0
98
Situational
40
100
Similar to the situational category of proximal deictic
items, this category stands for those distal spatial
deictics that refer to the general situational context in
Obama’s Twitter, mainly:
(i) speaker’s / hearer’s tacit knowledge on shared topic
mediated by the demonstratives that / those: that
nation, that spirit, those jobs, etc.;
(ii) indication of location through the place adverb
there: “As we mark the end of America’s combat
mission in Iraq, a grateful nation pays tribute to all who
150
Diagram 3. Quantitative distribution of categories for
proximal spatial deictic items in the Tweet-Obama
corpus
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Topics in Linguistics - Issue 9 – September 2012 – Approaches to Text and Discourse Analysis
have served there.” Unlike a similar description for the
proximal deictic here, the distal locative adverb there
does not correspond to speaker’s physical location per
se, rather, it encodes a less precise spatial dimension
and the involved parties: “The future is ours to win. But
to get there, we can’t just stand still.”
The indefinite category is represented only by two
occurrences of the locative deictic adverb there:
“Halfway there—you've already made 50,000 calls to
Congress. Help us reach 100,000.”
Low frequency of there in the corpus might be a
reasonable justification to exclude it from the category
list. However, being a deictic reference under the
scrutiny, there and all its instances in the corpus are
considered to be highly important for this study.
Further on, reading the concordance strings for this
group of spatial demonstratives reveals that that takes
NP complementation, while those is mostly used with
relative clauses (N=9) and adjectival phrases (N=6): that
nation; those who educate; those that take deposits;
among other.
Distal level of time deixis: then and soon
Distal level of time deixis in the Tweet-Obama corpus is
represented by adverbs soon (N=2) and then (N=1). It
has the lowest frequency rank of all selected deictic
references, and, thus, it is not subjected to further
categorization:
“Speaking on the economy and taking questions from
workers in Buffalo, New York, soon. Listen live: L”
The close reading of the concordance strings together
with larger units (i.e. tweets) of both adverbs does not
disambiguate the implied time period behind them.
However, the tweet metadata (i.e. date and time of
tweet publication) can be used to infer the approximate
time period for then which logically follows the one
indicated in the tweet.
Discussion and implication
The obtained results evidence a large occurrence of
deictic references in the corpus, in which personal
references (and their forms) we and you have a
quantitative superiority over they; and proximal
(temporal and spatial) deictic references over distal
ones. All of these references show ambiguity at the
discourse level thereby requiring a close inspection of
the collocational meaning and reference chain across
tweets so as to come up with patterns of collocation
and categories. It is interesting to point the ambiguous
and exclusive use of the pronoun we by Obama in his
Twitter. In the last case, we does not include possible
Twitter public referring rather to Obama and the
government, or Obama and his cabinet, than to Obama
and the nation. The multiple indexing, however, has a
certain degree to include possible Twitter audience into
Obama’s circle.
On the contrary, the personal deictic our is mostly used
as an inclusive reference, thus, admitting possible
public into Obama’s circle, and compensating exclusive
we. This play between exclusive and ambiguous we and
inclusive our might stand as an implicit language choice
of Obama’s digital rhetoric as a strategy to involve the
broadest audience possible. Regarding these findings,
it seems logical that the pronominal reference they (and
its forms) is found less frequent in the corpus. In terms
of constructing Obama’s digital rhetorical space, it can
be translated as a technique of getting closer to the
target audience, i.e. to shorten the distance between
the executive power (the president) and the potential
audience. Interestingly, 54% of all instances of the
exclusive deictic pronoun they (and its forms) refers to
the Americans, i.e. in spite of the exclusive character of
the deictic pronoun, its referents in the corpus are
reported as inclusive on the national level.
The results obtained for the spatial deixis demonstrate
the prevailing use of proximal over distal references,
marking out time as their most frequent antecedent.
Similarly, time deixis is also characterized by its use in
proximal rather than distal context. These findings
clearly emphasize a predominant choice of the inclusive
and proximal over exclusive and distal in Obama’s
digital rhetoric. One might claim that this is typical for
the online Twitter environment where the prompt
question to post a message is “What’s happening?” This
could be a challenging hypothesis to test as a
continuation of this research. However, in the scope of
the present research paper, the dominating proximity
and inclusiveness is considered as Obama’s discursive
technique in constructing digital rhetorical space on
Twitter. Mainly, it might lead to understanding Obama’s
Twitter as a rhetorical digital platform constructed with
a proximal and inclusive personal, time and space
contour in global and intercultural context as a way to
involve the broadest audience possible.
Thus, the Obama’s digital rhetorical space is limited to
the proximal level which connects the possible
Time deixis
Finally, the last set of deictic data deals with time
references now, then and soon based on the same
proximal-distal scheme applied for spatial deictic items:
Proximal
Distal
then
now
N=1
N=30
right now
soon
N=2
N=3
Total: 33
Total: 3
Table 7. Two-way level of time references in the TweetObama corpus
Proximal level of time deixis: now
From the data displayed in Table 7 it is seen that the
proximal level of time deictic items is reported more
frequently than the distal one. In spite of the fact that
the deictic now can be disambiguated by checking time
and date directly in the tweet, the close reading of the
concordance strings together with larger units (i.e.
tweets) underpins two main categories of now:
1.
immediate;
2.
indefinite.
The immediate now is accompanied by a verb in an
imperative mode and / or in progressive tense followed
by a supra-textual marker, or “non-linguistic reference”
(Werth, 1995, p. 156) - a hyperlink. These indices are
subjectively assigned as explicit markers to perform
immediate actions in Twitter: (i)read the tweet, and
(ii)click on the hyperlink now, i.e. at the decoding time
of the utterance (Fillmore, 1997):
“Watch live now: L”
However, the quantitative analysis for the corpus shows
that now occurs mostly as a vague time reference
(N=22), i.e. it does not correspond to its primary
meaning of immediacy - “at the present time or
moment” (cf. Webster online), or encoding / decoding
time (Fillmore, 1997) of the utterance; rather it stands
for indefinite, vague time span - “under the present
circumstances” (cf. Webster online):
“The time for health reform is now.”
Interestingly, the combination right now (N=3), which
stands for right away, immediately and without
hesitation (cf. Webster online), also falls under the
indefinite category of proximal time deictic references.
Alongside the indefinite now / right now does not
correspond to the immediate time reference either,
standing for a fuzzy time span in the corpus:
“You do incredible work -- and right now is the perfect
time to remember where we came from.”
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Topics in Linguistics - Issue 9 – September 2012 – Approaches to Text and Discourse Analysis
addressees with his virtual self and the message he
transmits. @BarackObama is constructed by means of
the deictics we, here and now; while they, there and
then are left apart, thereby explicitly demonstrating
president’s priority issues in online discourse.
Furthermore, this kind of Obama’s addressing the
virtual audience has shed some light on the way new
media reconfigure emerging democracies around the
globe.
As for the limits of this study, it is also important to
flash out the issues which are related to communication
and the virtual conditions and constraints of
communicating in Twitter as well as other issues worth
studying but beyond the scope of this research paper.
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