‘Malgré la pandémie’
President Macron’s 2021 New Year message to the nation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jalpp.21040Keywords:
Emmanuel Macron, first-person pronoun, modality, political discourse, process type, systemic functional linguisticsAbstract
This article presents an analysis of the 2021 New Year address to the nation given by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, after nine months of the COVID-19 crisis. The theoretical perspective used is systemic functional linguistics, and comparisons are made with my prior analysis of his address for the previous year. The study focuses on Macron’s use of personal pronouns. It was found that the first-person singular subject pronoun, je, occurs predominantly with mental processes, but that the plural subject pronoun, nous, occurs more frequently, and that the dominant process type is material. Further, whereas the first-person singular is rarely present other than as the subject, the first-person plural frequently occurs as a possessive. Thus, as is common in Macron’s discourse more generally, je is avoided in favour of nous, and Macron plays on the ambiguity of this pronoun to draw the public into shared responsibility for governmental policy. One difference with the 2020 address is that here he uses few expressions of modality, and these are rarely deontic (obligation), most being dynamic (physical possibility).
References
Albalat-Mascarell, Ana and Maria Luisa Carrió-Pastor (2019) Self-representation in political campaign talk: A functional metadiscourse approach to self-mentions in televised presidential debates. Journal of Pragmatics 147: 86–99. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2019.05.011
Banks, David (2016) On the (non)necessity of the hybrid category behavioural process. In Donna R. Miller and Paul Bayley (eds) Hybridity in Systemic Functional Linguistics: Grammar, Text and Discursive Context, 21–40. Sheffield: Equinox.
Banks, David (2017) A Systemic Functional Grammar of French: A Simple Introduction. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315228327
Banks, David (2019) A Systemic Functional Grammar of English: A Simple Introduction. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429467844
Banks, David (2021) ‘Un projet de justice et de progrès social’: President Macron’s 2020 New Year message to the nation. A linguistic viewpoint. Text and Talk. Online first. https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2020-0050
Halliday, M. A. K. and Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen (2014) Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar (4th edition). London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203783771
Labbé, Dominique (2019) Soixante-ans de discours présidentiels français (1958-2018). Qu’est-ce qui singularise Emmanuel Macron? Paper presented at the Séminaire Mathématique et Société, Université de Neuchâtel, 17 May. Online: https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-02149962/
Labbé, Dominique and Jacques Savoy (2021) Stylistic analysis of the French presidential speeches: Is Macron really different? Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 36 (1): 153–163. Online: https://arvix.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2105/2105.02844.pdf https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqz090
Lu, Qiuyan (2018) De la lecture à la déconstruction du discours: relation entre la langue et la vision du monde dans les discours de François Hollande et d’Emmanuel Macron. Synergies Chine 13: 117–130.
Mayaffre, Damon, Magali Guaresi and Laurent Vanni (2020) Ces mots que Macron emprunte à Sarkozy. Discours et intelligence artificielle. Corpus 21. https://doi.org/10.4000/corpus.5105
Mayaffre, Damon, Bénédicte Pincemin and Céline Poudat (2019) Explorer, mesurer, contextualiser. Quelques apports de la textométrie à l’analyse de discours. Langue Française 203 (2019/3): 101–115. https://doi.org/10.3917/lf.203.0101
Mayaffre, Damon and Laurent Vanni (2020) Objectiver l’intertexte? Emmanuel Macron, deep learning et statistique textuelle. Paper presented at 15èmes Journées Internationales d’Analyse Statistiques de Données Textuelles. Toulouse, 16–19 June 2020. Online: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02894990/document
Negro Alousque, Isabel (2021) Les metaphors du virus COVID-19 dans les discours d’Emmanuel Macron et de Pedro Sánchez. Cédille, Revista de Estudios Franceses 19: 595–613. https://doi.org/10.25145/j.cedille.2021.19.24
O’Donnell, Michael, Michele Zappavigna and Casey Whitelaw (2008) A survey of process type classification over difficult cases. In Carys Jones and EjiaVentola (eds) New Developments in the Study of Ideational Meaning: From Language to Multimodality, 47–64. London: Continuum.
Umam, Khotibul, Sri Rejeki Urip and Bernadus Wahyudi Joko Santoso (2019) La cohesion grammatical en langue française au discours de la parole Emmanuel Macron. Digital Press Social Sciences and Humanities 3: Article 00028. https://doi.org/10.29037/digitalpress.43301
Utah, David N. (2017) Analyse stylistique des éléments déictiques dans le discours inaugural du président français Emmanuel Macron. Covenant Journal of Language Studies 5 (2): 48–63.
Published
Issue
Section
License
Equinox Publishing Ltd.