Who are we?: Contesting meanings in the speeches of national leaders in Taiwan during the authoritarian period

• Jennifer M. Wei ^[1] ; Ren-feng Duann ^[2]
  1. [1] Soochow University

     Soochow University

     China

     
  2. [2] National Taitung University

     National Taitung University

     Taitung City, Taiwán

     
• Localización: Journal of language and politics, ISSN 1569-2159, Vol. 18, Nº. 5, 2019, págs. 760-781
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This paper analyzes how political aspirations and convictions during Taiwan’s authoritarian period (from the 1940s to 1996) are expressed through first-person plural pronouns. Combining both corpus-assisted method and discourse historical analysis (DHA, Wodak et al. 1999), we compared the speeches delivered by the presidents – Chiang Kai-shek (CKS, 1955–1975), Chiang Ching-kuo (CCK, 1978–1988), and Lee Teng-hui (LTH, 1989–1996) – from the one-party domination era to the time of the direct presidential elections in 1996. Moreover, by locating lexical items in the co-texts and checking the collocates, we have tried to find referents of we against changing socio-political contexts. The meaning of we has changed from representing Chinese compatriots on the Chinese mainland and the revolutionary militia in CKS’s speeches to an over-inclusion and more hearer-dominant (HD) we in CCK’s speeches. A 'wandering we' was found in LTH’s speeches with which a well-defined national collectivity was difficult to identify in the late 1980s.