Noticing 'us' and 'them' constructions: The pedagogical implications of a critical discourse analysis of referring in political discourse

Abstract

In the past decade, there have been a number of discourse analyses of the political in South Africa such as Botha’s (2001) study of deictic expressions in a speech by Thabo Mbeki, Moodley’s (2006) discursive analysis of the South African government’s Information and Communication Technologies, poverty, and development discourse, and Moon’s (2006) investigation into the discursive construction of narratives generated during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. However, how such studies may be exploited to foster students’ critical thinking about language use in a variety of communicative contexts has not been explored in much detail. Within the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the aim of this paper is to examine the phenomenon of referring in a political speech by Robert Mugabe, focusing specifically on his use of spatial, temporal, and social indexicals to construct us versus them territories. Next, the constructivist principles that may be adopted to assist second-year Linguistics students in developing an awareness that referring is not a neutral phenomenon are identified.