Stance and dialogicity in Barack Obama and George W. Bush's farewell addresses to the nation: Effectivity, epistemicity and (contrastive) negation

Abstract

The aim of this article is to compare choices in epistemic and effective stance markers and negation as a marker of stance in the farewell addresses by US presidents Obama and Bush. The discussion focuses on how these choices reveal specific stance-taking acts of positioning towards topics and alignment/disalignment with communities of speakers and how they contribute to construing two different idiosyncratic interactional or dialogic stance styles. The analysis reveals that Obama's interactional stance style can be argued to be highly dialogic and relies on a combination of stance markers, among which directivity and contrastive negation stand out, since they are absent in Bush. Directivity is used to engage directly with his audience and persuade them to take specific courses of action regarding the future of America, while contrastive negation is used to write in different voices in his speech, creating complex relations of (dis)alignment with communities of speakers. Bush's interactional stance style relies more on choices which involve the expression of epistemic certainty and deontic modality, as a means of legitimizing a positioning towards America in which the safeguard of national security is his major concern.