Rachelle Vessey Published in Journal of Pragmatics
Associate Professor Rachelle Vessey has a new article published in the Journal of Pragmatics, titled “Putting negotiation on a ‘principal-ed’ footing: A corpus-informed discourse analysis of person deixis in diplomatic debates.”
Co-authored with British colleague Professor Lisa McEntee-Atalianis and with the research assistance of Carleton ALDS graduate student Morgan Williams, this paper examines how United Nations diplomats alternate between different affiliations in their negotiation of multilingualism policy.
“The paper focuses on the strategic enactment of politically recognisable identities indexed via first-person pronouns. Findings reveal that those holding the same stance (e.g., voting in favour, against, or abstaining in the 1995 Multilingualism Resolution) show clear patterns of deictic anchorage in their adoption of certain positions over others. Speakers adopt footings strategically and systematically via iterative and accretive processes of pronoun and verb selection to balance competing needs and perspectives relating to their own positionality (as members of the UN, representatives of their member states, or members within alliances) and in relation to domestic and international affairs.“
– From the abstract for “Putting negotiation on a ‘principal-ed’ footing: A corpus-informed discourse analysis of person deixis in diplomatic debates”
You can find the full article here.