An analysis of political discourse : First-person personal pronoun ‘I’ in Joe Biden’s speeches

Abstract: This study investigates the use of the first-person personal pronoun ‘I’ in political discourse and, more specifically, the functions of Represented ‘I’ and Situated ‘I’, including subcategories, present in Joe Biden’s speeches. A corpus was compiled, consisting of 12 speeches that brought up the topic of the war in Ukraine. The aim of the analysis was to examine the frequency of the pronouns in the speeches and their functions. The study is based on categories from Roitman’s (2014) and Albalat-Mascarell and Carrió-Pastor’s (2019) research on presidential debates. The results reveal that Represented ‘I’ is the most frequent use of the pronoun, which presents speakers as politicians in the real world rather than positions them in the discursive situation, as in the case of Situated ‘I’. Since Situated ‘I’ was categorized only with regard to the discursive verbs of the current discourse, it might have contributed to the big difference in frequencies between Represented ‘I’ and Situated ‘I’.