Positioning in pre-prepared and spontaneous parliamentary discourse: Choice of person in the Parliament of Montenegro

Abstract

Pronominal choice in political talk reflects hidden ideologies, which is why it has been a much-studied phenomenon in the discourse analytic research of politics in western democracies. However, similar topics remain largely unexplored in eastern and transition countries. With this in mind, the aim of the present article is to explore the use of subject pronouns and the person of the verb in the Parliament of Montenegro. The budget debate conducted in December 2009 was chosen for the corpus and was later subdivided into 10-minute pre-prepared ‘Speeches’ and three-minute ‘Comments’, which represent spontaneous responses. The two subcorpora were then compared with respect to person deixis. The results of the study point to the fact that, when given the chance to carefully plan their talk in advance, the MPs used the first-person plural and positive self-campaign much more often. On the other hand, in their spontaneous talk, the MPs more often referred to themselves as individuals and resorted more readily to addressing others using negative presentation strategies. Their prepared talk was therefore crafted and tailored for political effect through the use of consciously employed persuasive strategies that relate to the choice of person. It is suggested that the comparison of pre-scripted and unscripted political talk can reveal underlying political ideologies.