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. 46 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 47 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 48 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. 49 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; 50 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): 51 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 52 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.” 53 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. 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