Leaderships identity development in political discourse

Abstract

Discourse encompasses various social processes, and one of them is identity. From the perspective of discourse analysis, a suitable approach is vital to demystify and explicate it. Political leaders gain influence by the means of politics, hence the establishment of leadership identity in the form of discourse (both spoken and written) is crucial especially to newly elected leaders of a government or a particular political party. This thus furthers the ground to scrutinise the notion of identity development in political discourse. Hecht (1993), Keller (1997) and Hall (2002), among others, put forward the emphasis that language and identity are inseparable. The appropriate language selection is therefore able to display the identity of a leader. The present study aims to examine the extent of whether political discourse, particularly the aspect of personal pronouns (PP), is able to dictate leadership identity of a political party’s president. The piece also ascertains various forms of PP with subsequent elucidations on the relationship between discourse and identity development. PP such as ‘saya’, ‘kita’ and ‘kami’ are able to exude whether a leader has the tendency of self-display, individuality, togetherness, unity, authority etc. In doing so, the study extrapolates speeches of seven former UMNO Presidents as the data. A critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach is opted to serve the purpose of the study as it holds both language studies and their background social processes parallel.