‘YES, WE CAN’: THE USE OF DEICTIC UTTERANCES IN THE INAUGURAL SPEECH OF PRESIDENT NANA ADDO DANKWA AKUFO-ADDO

Abstract

The study examines President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo's use of personal pronouns to create different identities and to sway public opinion, and support for a political goal in his inaugural address. The goal of the study is to identify the individual to whom the President is referring when he employs the personal pronoun ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘you’, and ‘we’. The key emphasis of the study is to determine whom the President refers to when he uses the personal pronouns I and me, you, and us from the three-tier analytical framework of Fairclough (1980) thus description, interpretation, and explanation. The results suggest that the pronominal choices and their referent swing greatly depending on the context of the speech. The findings reveal the ideologies that Nana Addo aims to espouse. Again, the findings have far-reaching consequences for inaugural address research as a tool for understanding the relationship between rhetorical substance and style and the characteristics unique to presidential political and social perspectives.<p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/soc/0014/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>