INTRODUCTION 1 Rationale for the study
Aim and scope of the study
The aim of this study is to enrich the knowledge of deixis in use, especially to investigate person deixis in political speech Consequently, communication can be enhanced
This study is expected to give significant knowledge to the students about political communication; hence, they can be more aware of statements coming from politicians In terms of English teaching, this study is expected contribute to the understanding of deixis and its use in an English utterance, especially when it is spoken by a native speaker
To achieve the aim of this research, the following questions are set:
What kinds of person deixis are used in John Kerry‟s remarks on climate change?
What are the referents of person deixis used in John Kerry‟s remarks on climate change?
What are the political communication purpose(s) achieved by using the person deixis in the speech?
This small piece of work is not expected to cover all the aspects relating to deixis Owing to the time constraint and knowledge of the writer, this study is limited to the use of person deixis in only one speech Other types of deixis namely spatial, temporal, social, and discourse deixis are beyond the scope of the study.
Design of the study
The study is presented as follows
Part 1 – Introduction mentions some suggestions and fundamental ideas to lead in the main part of the thesis Chapter I includes “the rationale of the study”, “the aim of the study”, “the research questions”, “the method of the study”, “the scope of the study”, and
“the design of the study”, respectively.
DEVELOPMENT
Chapter I – A background to the study deals with the theoretical background that inspires the thesis and the related literature review of person deixis in political communication
Chapter II – Methodology presents the methodology and procedure in data collection and analysis applied in this study The writer describes her research design and the way she collected, classified and analyzed the data
Chapter III - Findings and Discussion analyzes the collected data then withdraws the final conclusions of the thesis Further discussion on findings will be presented with examples that emerge from the data analysis as well as the personal interpretations and comments from the author
Part 3 - Conclusion gives the summary of the thesis by providing answers to the research questions presented Implications for teaching and learning pragmatics derived from the thesis are also revealed in this chapter Finally, the writer will review the limitations of this study and make suggestions for further research.
A BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY
Political discourse
Discourse is such a broad term with many definitions, ranging from linguistics through other disciplines Teun A van Dijk generally considered discourse as text in context (Horváth, 2009: 45) From this, it can be concluded that the term “discourse” is wider than “text” as “discourse” refers to the whole process of social interaction of which a text is just a part” (Fairclough, 1989: 24)
According to Schaffner (1996), political discourse, as a sub-category of discourse in general, can be based on two criteria: functional and thematic Political discourse is a result of politics and it is historically and culturally determined It fulfills different functions due to different political activities It is thematic because its topics are primarily related to politics such as political activities, political ideas and political relations
Van Dijk (2009: 1) emphasized that a discourse cannot be fully understood without understanding its context Therefore, in order to achieve a comprehensive analysis, the context of the John Kerry‟s remarks on climate change was explained The writer focused on information about the speaker, John Kerry and the situation when the text was delivered
On February 1, 2013, John Forbes Kerry was sworn in as the 68th Secretary of State of the United States, becoming the first sitting Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman to become Secretary in over a century Secretary Kerry joined the State Department after 28 years in the United States Senate, the last four as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee As Secretary of State, all his speeches received much attention from the public Among those speeches, the writer chose his Remarks on Climate Change as the data for analysis John Kerry‟s remarks on climate change were delivered to a group of students and government officials at on February 16, 2014 at an American cultural center in Jakarta, Indonesia The speech was delivered a day after the U.S and China issued a joint agreement saying that they had agreed on steps to carry out commitments to cooperate closely in reducing the effects of climate change U.S officials were hoping that other nations, particularly those in the developing world, will follow suit John Kerry chose Indonesia for the first of what is to be a series of speeches on the topic partly because as he said in his speech, this country, as an archipelago of more than 17,000 islands, was “on the front lines of climate change” and some of the most vulnerable to the effects of global warming In his speech, John Kerry highlighted that climate change is real and call Indonesian people and authorities to step up effort to combat it.
Person deixis
It is believed that language does not only possess a specific structure but also a variety of functions These language functions belong to the field of pragmatics which concerns with the study of meaning as communicated by speaker (or writer) and interpreted by listener (or reader) Pragmatics is closely related with the context or setting of an utterance instead of the structure of the utterance itself An utterance is interpreted not only based on its words‟ meaning, but also based on its context or factors outside of the denotative meaning itself Such scope of Pragmatics would include the study of deixis
According to Yule (1996: 9), deixis is the technical term for one of the most basic things we do with utterances The term deixis is gained from the Greek word meaning pointing or indicating (Levinson 1983: 54) It signifies different things to different people (Cruse 2000: 319)
“Deixis introduces subjective, attentional, intentional and of course context- dependent properties into natural languages” (Levinson in Horn/Ward 2006: 97) In relationship between language and context is reflected in the structures of language themselves, is through the phenomenon of deixis” (1983: 54) The importance of deictic information in interpreting utterances is best demonstrated by what happens when such information is missing (Fillmore 1975: 38-39 in Levinson 1983: 54)
Deixis is traditionally divided into three categories: person, time, and place deixis
In Yule (1996) and Cruse (2000), the term „temporal deixis‟ is used instead of „time deixis‟ and the term „place deixis‟ is replaced by „spatial deixis‟ Following Lyons (1986, 1977a) and Fillmore (1972b, 1975), Levinson adds to the traditional categories two more deixis types: discourse (or text) deixis and social deixis (1983: 62) As the purpose of this study is analyzing person deixis, the writer only reviews theoretical background about person deixis
The different roles that individuals play in the speech event (speaker, addressee, and other) are directly reflected by the grammatical category of person (Levinson in Horn/Ward 2006: 112) The two semantic features of speaker inclusion (S) and addressee inclusion (A) capture the traditional person paradigm: first person (+S), second person (+A, -S), and third person (-S, -A) Additionally, Levinson emphasizes that “although person deixis is reflected directly in the grammatical categories of person, it may be argued that we need to develop an independent pragmatic framework of possible participant roles, so that we can see how and to what extent these roles are applied in different languages” (1983: 68)
Yule (1996: 11) suggests that in deictic terms, third person is not a direct participant in basic (I-you) interaction (outsider) which results distant Thus, third person pronouns are consequently distal forms in the term of person deixis She also mentioned that for pronoun “we” there is potential ambiguity which is possibly cause misinterpretation There is exclusive” we” (speaker plus other(s), excluding addressee) and an inclusive “we” (speaker and addressee include) Furthermore, Levinson (1983: 69) mentions that “we” does not always mean plural: the inclusive-exclusive distinction also appear in “let‟s go” (inclusive-to some friends) and “let us go” (exclusive-to someone who has captured the speaker and friends)
The summary of person deixis kinds is tabulated as follow:
Figure 1: Subdivision of singular person deixis
SINGULAR Subject Object Reflexive Possessive
First person I Me Myself My mine
Second person You You Yourself your yours
Masculine He Him Himself His his
Feminine She Her Herself Her hers
Neuter It It Itself Its its
Figure 2: Subdivision of plural person deixis
PLURAL Subject Object Reflexive Possessive
First person We Us Ourselves our ours
Second person You You Yourself your yours
Third person They Them Themselves their theirs
(Source: Cornelius Puschmann: Thank you for thinking we could: Use and function of interpersonal pronouns in corporate web logs [12/28/09])
2.3 The Role of Person deixis in Political Communication
It has been mentioned that deixis, within its simplicity, contained broad meaning of interpretation, especially when it comes to political field It is based on the idea that in order to gain voice from the society, the way of communicating with the society must be arranged as interesting as possible to make a lasting impression to the recipient
Therefore, when deixis is applied in a speech, it is believed to give significant contribution to the overall impact of the speech
Beard (2000: 24) claims that pronoun preference is always important for the use of political persuasion For example, pronoun „your‟ can mean given an immediate sense that the reader (s) is being addressed personally and the use of pronoun „we‟ for inclusion and exclusion Furthermore, Beard (2000: 44-45) points out essentially five ways politicians can introduce a measure that they intend to apply, they are:
First person singular pronoun “I‟ as in “Today I intend to reduce taxes by 20 percents”
First person plural pronoun „we‟ as in “Today we intend to raise the taxes by a mere 5 percent”
Referring to position, like “The Chancellor must raise taxes for the long-term good of the nation‟s economy” or the role as part of the government: “The government must raise taxes ”
No agentive pronoun at all and only use agentless passive without direct responsibility for action given, as in “Today it has been found necessary to raise taxes by 20 percent.”
Using metonymy: “This budget will help all those on low incomes.”
Referring to number one and two, it means that when politicians make a speech, they have two sets of first pronouns They can use first person singular (I, me, myself, or mine) or first person plural (we, us, ourselves, and ours) According to Beard (2000: 45), the first person plural forms can have a range of references:
They can refer to „I‟ plus one other; i.e we = the leader+ vise
They can refer to „I‟ plus a group; i.e we = the leader + government and/ or political party
They can refer to „I‟ plus the whole country; i.e we = the leader + society
They can refer to „I‟ plus the rest of humanity; i.e we = the leader + people everywhere
Not only does Bread mention two sets of first pronouns but he also clarifies the advantage and disadvantage when using them:
Singular pronouns (I/me/myself/mine)
- show a clear sense of personal involvement on the part of the speaker, which is especially useful when good news is delivered
- show all too clearly where blame lies if something goes wrong
- can be seen as too self- important, with the individual speakers placing themselves above or outside the collective responsibility of their colleagues
Plural pronouns (we/us/ourselves/ours)
- help share the responsibility, especially when the decisions made are thought to be rejected by the society
- show the politician in touch with all of the country, even all of the world
- individual does not gain so much credit when things go well
The various objectives of the use of pronoun above make politicians and their speech writers have some difficulties in making decision of right time to use pronouns that will keep appearing in their speeches including:
How much responsibility are prepared to take on themselves?
How much responsibility for success are they wiling to share with other colleagues?
How confident are they that the whole groups of people share their views?
How much responsibility for failure are they prepared to accept as their own?
Finally, if we summarize all the explanation above, we can find an easy way to see how those points give significant effects to the overall speech content.
The Role of Context in Using Deixis
Hymes (1964) in Brown and Yule (1983: 38) specifies the features of context which may be relevant to the identification of a type of speech event They are addressor and addressee “The addressor is the speaker or writer who produced an utterance and the addressee is the hearer or the reader who is the recipient of the utterance” (Brown and Yule 1983: 38) Knowing who are the speaker and the hearer makes it possible for analysts to predict and interpret his/her utterance by extra linguistic factors of both the speaker and the hearer, thus the more analysts know about the features of context, the more likely he is to be able to predict what is likely to be said (Brown and Yule 1983: 38-
40) Context covers the identities of participants, the temporal and spatial parameters of the speech event, the beliefs, knowledge and intention of the participants in the speech event (Levinson 1983: 6)
There are three kinds of context that influence the interpretation of an utterance; they are the situational context, the background knowledge of context, and the co-textual context
3.1 The Situational Context/ Exophoric Reference
Situational context means that the surroundings or the situation can provide the meaning to a word, so the words do not have to be explicitly stated (Cutting 2002: 57) The example of situational context is as follow:
There is a conversation between A and B who are sitting with the curtains drawn
A: God it‟s hot here B: Is it?
C: Yeah, really Are you shutting out this lovely sunshine?
A‟s “God it‟s hot here” has place deixis “here” pointing to the room that they are in B and C know that A means the room, not the whole building or the whole city The sentence “are you shutting out this lovely sunshine?” contains spatial deixis pointing to the sunshine shining through the curtains (Cutting 2002: 56) In those examples, A does not say “it‟s hot here in this lecturer room” and C does not say “Are you shutting out this lovely sunshine that is coming through the curtains at the window behind you?” because the hearer have known the place they refer to
Background knowledge context means that speakers assume a common knowledge of the course, knowledge that is only known by the members of the speakers There are two kinds of background knowledge context; they are cultural general knowledge and interpersonal knowledge
According to Cutting, cultural general knowledge is a common knowledge that most people carry with them in their minds, about areas of life (2002: 5) For example:
B, an Englishman, had planned to go to Spain for Easter but could not afford the tickets; he tells A, a Scottish woman, that he ended up going hill walking in Arran, an island off the west coast of Scotland
A: So you went to Arran A bit of a come-down isn‟t it! (laughing)
B: It was nice actually Have you been to Arran?
A: No I‟ve not Like to go
A: (heh) B: I went with Francesca and David
B: Francesca‟s room-mate And Alice‟s – a friend of Alice‟s from London
There were six of us Yeah we did a lot of hill walking We got back
Michelle and I got home she looked at her knees They were like this
Swollen up like this Cos we did this enormous eight hour stretch
In this example, when B said that he and his friends went „hill walking‟, that they walked for eight hour there, or that the walk was strenuous enough to make somebody‟s knees swell, A does not appear to be surprised because A and B share cultural knowledge about the low mountains on the island (Cutting 2002: 5)
Interpersonal background knowledge refers to specific and possibly private knowledge about the history of the speakers themselves (Cutting 2002:5) In example
(11), it is clear that both A and B know who „Michelle‟ is: B would have told A in previous conversation that his wife‟s name is „Michelle‟ Cutting also states that knowledge acquired through previous verbal interactions or joint activities and experiences is interpersonal knowledge (2002:6)
Co-textual context is the context of the text itself, known as the co-text (Cutting 2002: 8) It means that the context is not depending either on the environment nor the speaker, yet the composition of the text itself There are two kinds of co-text, they are endophoric reference/ endophora and exophoric reference/ exophora
Exophoric reference is when there is no previous mention of the referent in the text, depending on the context outside of the text (Cutting 2002: 9)
If the pronouns refer to items within the same text, it is called endophoric reference (Cutting 2002: 9) There are two types of endophora, they are anaphora and cataphora, and he describes each type as follow:
The summary of reference is as follow:
Political Discourse Propaganda
Beard (2000: 53) believes that making a speech is a vital part of the politician‟s role announcing policy and persuading people to agree with him This is in line with the purpose of a speech that the speech maker attempts to convince the recipients to agree with the content of the speech, therefore, the language in political speech has been arranged well for the audience‟s further political action
In the past years, many researchers have studied “propaganda technique” One of the noticeable theories about propaganda was developed by Horold D Lasswell, a political science professor at the University of Chicago in 1927 He explains that the multiplication of those stimuli which are best calculated to evoke the desired responses may be said to be concerned with the propagandist, and with the nullification of those stimuli which are likely to instigate the undesired responses The problem of the propagandist is to multiply all the suggestions favorable to the attitudes which he wishes to produce and strengthen, and to restrict all suggestions which are unfavorable to them
In this sense of the word, suggestion refers to cultural material with a recognizable meaning instead of individual psychology which to mean the acceptance of an idea without reflection (Lasswell 1927: 630-631)
There are four major objectives of propaganda (Lasswell, 1927, in Pinkerton, 2006: 26), they are:
1 To mobilize hatred against the enemy
2 To preserve the friendship of allies
3 To preserve the friendship and, if it is possible, to procure the cooperation of neutrals
4 To demoralize the enemy There are seven propaganda devices of propaganda, they are name calling, glittering generality, transfer, testimonial, plain folks, card stacking and ban wagon (Sproule, 2001:136).
Related Study
In 2006, Akinbiyi Adetunji analyzed inclusion and exclusion in two Nigeria President Olusegun Obasanjo's Speeches In Text A, the deictic centre is nearer the plural
"we" than the usual, singular "I" This reflects the all-embracing content and context of the speech, which is given away by the rapport-inviting opening sequence,
"Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen" As such "we", the commonest personal deictic in the speech, has been deliberately employed by the speaker to convince and probably manipulate the audience to reason like him and help him in sharing the load of responsibility In Text B, the deictic "I" preponderates, essentially because the speaker speaks from a personal point of view, verbalising a particular conviction whose general (the populace, its "royal" arm) acceptability we may not be sure of His occasional use of
"we" is sheerly an appeal to "ideological common sense" (Fairclough 1989: 88), a subtle conscription suggested by the speech's opening salutation "Fellow Nigerians"(a formulaic introduction made popular by Nigerian military coup announcers for public acceptance
In sum, there is an essential difference between the situations of deixis in Texts A and B
While the speaker in Text A seeks an acceptance from and a collaboration with the audience, the speaker rejects the ways of and vilifies the referent "he", in Text B Text A is thus speaker-inclusive, a macro-text of "inclusion" Text B presents a self-exclusive speaker Text B is, as such, a macro-text of "exclusion"
Another research on the same topic titled “From solidarity to antagonism: The uses of the second-person singular pronoun in Chinese political discourse” is conducted by Kuo in 2002 Kuo (2002) has explored the use of deixis for indexing political debates
Two televised debates of the 1998 Taipei mayoral election were analyzed He reports that the frequency of the second-person singular pronounce “ni” (you) in the second debate is increasing significantly in comparison to the first debate His study shows that the use of second-person plural “ni” (you) is deployed differently by the candidates Kuo suggests that the different uses of “ni” in the two debates signal the change of interactive goal of the debate from establishing or reinforcing solidarity with the audience to expressing
METHODOLOGY
Research methods and instruments
Working as the descriptive research, the study employs qualitative method as the major technique From some descriptive research types of study, a document analysis is used since the information obtained in this study is document in the form of speech transcript
Qualitative research is best chosen for this study since the data used is deictic expressions in the form of words Therefore, the frequency of the person deixis that appeared is only used to explain the pattern of the deixis occurrence Along with document analysis, referencing to publications is considered one of the most fundamental techniques since it provides the theoretical and empirical bases for this study
In qualitative research, the researcher with or without any other personal helping is considered as the main determiner in collecting the data (Lichtman 2009: 16; Merriam 2009: 39) This thesis is a qualitative study; therefore, the researcher will be the instrument and she will use the documentary evidence in the analysis She will not use any questionnaire to solve the problem.
Data of the study
The data of this study is the person deixis in the form of words and phrases used in the speech The transcript of the speech is obtained from John Kerry‟s remarks on climate change on the website of U.S Department of State
The writer focuses on the transcript to find the person deixis used in the speech In order to find out all the instances of person deixis, she used the tool “Find” in Microsoft Word To verify the result, she used a website called Writeword This website offers Word Frequency Counter, which counts the number of words used in a text and frequency The results are listed from the words with the highest occurrence to the one with the lowest occurrence The writer compared the results from Microsoft Word with those from the website to assure that they were exactly the same Later on, she classified the person deixis based on the subdivision which is divided into first personal, second personal and third personal To find what person deixis were used in the speech, the writer analysed the person deixis that exists from each paragraph.
Data analysis
Basing on the data collected, the writer sets an analysis procedure as follow:
Step 1: recognizing and categorizing the person deixis Subsequence to identifying the data as shown on the data collection technique, the person deixis is classified into three categories: first personal, second personal, and third person deixis Each category is constituted of two subdivisions: singular and plural
Step 2: analyzing and illustrating data
At the next phrase, the data collected from the previous step is analyzed to find the corresponding referents by seeing the context that comes with the data It is necessary to note that not all the instances of person deixis were analyzed and discussed in this paper
The writer only chose the significant instances The findings of the referents are obtained through the concept of context subdivision as a means of finding the referents for deixis
The context itself is seen from the context inside the text (endophora) and context outside the text (exophora) If the person deixis is not exophoric, it will be further analyzed to determine whether it is anaphoric or cataphoric
After finding the referents of the person deixis used, the classified data are then analyzed by describing the purpose of person deixis employed in the speech based on theory on political communication objectives as well as the personal experience of the writer.
FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
Kinds of Person deixis used in John Kerry‟s Remarks on Climate Change
After analyzing the text, kinds of person deixis found in the text were summarized in the following figure
Figure 4: Kinds of person deixis used in John Kerry’s Remarks on Climate Change Kinds of person deixis Person Deixis Occurrence Frequency (%)
2 Referents and Political Purposes of Person deixis used in John Kerry’s Remarks on Climate Change
The analysis of person deixis and its referent is divided into the analysis of subdivision of person deixis The context itself is seen from the context inside the text (endophora) and context outside the text (exophora) The next part focuses on the findings and discussion about the person deixis used in this speech
First person deixis is divided into first person singular and first person plural First person plural refers to the speaker of an utterance, either including the addressee or the excluding the addressee
First person singular covers the pronoun of “I”, “me”, and “myself”, “my” and
“mine” However, there are only three of them occurs in this speech; they are pronoun
“I”, its objective form “me” and its possessive form “my” All together, there are 41 occurrences of the first singular deixis in the speech Person deixis “I” refers to subject as self pointing to the speaker, here, John Kerry and “me” shows object position which also refers to John Kerry Figure 5 summarizes the results obtained for John Kerry‟s use of first personal singular deixis in the speech
Figure 5: Occurrence of first person singular
Thank you, Robert Thank you very, very much I don‟t know I think some of you were cheering twice for the same university I don‟t know It seemed to come from the same place anyway
What a pleasure to be here at America, where we are looking at all of the air conditioning pipes running right through here I love it The spirit and feel of this place is very special and it‟s wonderful to see our friends up here from Kalimantan and also everybody from Sumatra Thank you very much for being with us Can you hear me? Yeah! Wave! Do a few selfies, everybody will Anyway, it‟s really a pleasure to be here I see a lot of iPads up in the air sort of flashing away
These paragraphs were used by John Kerry to express his gratitude to every student who attended the event at American cultural center in Jakarta These lines are exophoric since when John Kerry mentioned the person deixis “I‟, there is no mentioned referent before or after the text, but it is still clear that “I” refers to himself as the speaker, as the Secretary of State However, the way he called the Ambassador Robert Orris Blake, Jr as
“Robert” and other audience as “friends” created a cozy atmosphere It made the event similar to a gathering between students at a university because the Secretary and the Ambassador once were students at university Therefore, the person deixis “I” here referred to John Kerry not only as a Secretary of State but also as a senior student and as a friend of the audience
Unlike the paragraphs analyzed above, the following paragraph revealed a more specific use of the pronoun “I” It can be seen that “I” referred to John Kerry as the Secretary of State as he emphasized that “This year, as Secretary of State, I will engage in a series of discussions on the urgency of addressing climate change…” After getting closer to the audience by addressing himself as part of the audience, John Kerry introduced the main topic of the event that was “climate change” with an emphasis on his status in politics as Secretary of State As the result, the reliability and importance of the speech were increased since those words were delivered by the representative of a leading country, the United States of America
This year, as Secretary of State, I will engage in a series of discussions on the urgency of addressing climate change – particularly on the national security implications and the economic opportunities And I want you to think about those
But I wanted to start right here, in Jakarta, because this city – this country – this region – is really on the front lines of climate change It‟s not an exaggeration to say to you that the entire way of life that you live and love is at risk So let‟s have a frank conversation about this threat and about what we, as citizens of the world, need to be able to do to address it
There was not only one time John Kerry highlighted his position as Secretary of State
When John Kerry wanted to sharpen his arguments and increase trust from the audience, his political status was emphasized
When I think about the array of global climate – of global threats – think about this: terrorism, epidemics, poverty, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction – all challenges that know no borders – the reality is that climate change ranks right up there with every single one of them And it is a challenge that I address in nearly every single country that I visit as Secretary of State, because President Obama and I believe it is urgent that we do so… hear is that it‟s going to be too expensive to be able to address climate change I have to tell you, that assertion could not be less grounded in fact In fact, it‟s exactly the opposite…
All the instances of “I” in the speech were used to refer to the speaker, Secretary of State John Kerry, except the following case
“Every bit of evidence I‟ve seen persuades me that we are on a course leading to tragedy.”
“I” here did not refer to John Kerry In order to clarify the special use of the pronoun “I” in this case, it is necessary to refer to the paragraph from which this sentence was picked up
Some time ago I travelled to another vibrant city – a city also rich with its own rich history – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil And I was there, sitting in a big room, surrounded by representatives from about 170 countries We listened as expert after expert after expert described the growing threat of climate change and what it would mean for the world if we failed to act The Secretary General of the conference was – he was an early leader on climate change, a man by the name of Maurice Strong, and he told us – I quote him: “Every bit of evidence I‟ve seen persuades me that we are on a course leading to tragedy.”
The first three “I”s were obviously referred to John Kerry but the last one was deployed to refer to Maurice Strong Since John Kerry quoted the whole sentence from Maurice Strong, the referent of “I” was Maurice Strong, not John Kerry This means that the risk of climate change is undeniable because it is conclude from scientific evidence The name of a scientist and his own words brought about the reliability of what John Kerry talked about Furthermore, it made the argument more objective since it was not only John Kerry‟s ideology One more time the reliability of the speech was increased
Finally it can be concluded that John Kerry uses “I” for different functions He used “I” as Secretary of State, “I” as John Kerry with his personality, who highly appreciated his audience from coming, as a citizen who were aware of the threat of climate change and as a pioneer in the battle against climate change Therefore, it can be concluded that, on the one hand, “I” used for clarifying his position compared with the others, and for framing his good public image towards the audience It made the Indonesians believed in what he said because every word was assured by his political position as the representative of the State On the other hand, “I” also referred to John Kerry as an individual like other people This narrowed the distance between him and others and made what he said closely related to the audience
CONCLUSION 1 Recapitulation
Based on the theoretical background about deixis of John Kerry‟s remarks on climate change, this thesis has reached its fulfillment
The result of the analysis showed that not all subdivisions of person deixis types were deployed in the speech The person deixis were used both exophorically and endophorically Therefore, the referents of the person deixis were found by seeing the context provided by the transcript itself
While analyzing what person deixis are used in the speech, the writer also analyzed the referents of person deixis used in the speech
Person deixis “I” and “we” became the most dominant person deixis appeared in the speech John Kerry used inclusive “we” to position himself as part of certain groups
Meanwhile “I” is used to show his identity and personality in the role of Secretary of State It is finally found that “we” functions to involve himself as participant and “I” functions as self positioning The shifting of “I” and “we” are used by John Kerry for group identification which is a condition when individuals define themselves socially primarily with reference to salient groups of which they are members
The use of the person deixis mentioned above finally lead the achieved political communication purpose that is to preserve friendship (the relationship between John Kerry and Indonesian people)
It can be seen that the use of person deixis “we” resulted in the effect that the society was being cared and subjected by John Kerry, especially when he used “we” to create togetherness in seeing and experiencing the problems about climate change John Kerry delivered the message of togetherness in facing the problems and togetherness to make the same steps in overcoming the problems This was how the messages successfully delivered Finally, it could be concluded that person deixis choice contributed significantly to the success of a speech acceptance that it must be carefully chosen
In terms of pragmatics, John Kerry‟s Remark on Climate Change can work as a great material for it provides the real situation where a native speaker uses certain kinds of deixis with the aim of influencing others Teaching pragmatics by increasing the pragmatic knowledge of the learners through the authentic material enables them to interpret, understand and use appropriate person deixis in a particular situation
Furthermore, authentic materials can be more appealing and interesting with learners than imagined conversations because it is close to the real life As a result their motivation can be considerably enhanced As a learning progress, L2 learners acquire both pragmatics and linguistics knowledge The findings of this study also reveal that the use of person deixis and the purposes of communication are closely related, especially in the case of politics In order to increase the pragmatic ability of students, explicit instructions are significant Basing on the material, teachers can guide students to do several exercises
For instance, learners can be asked to find the person deixis in the speech and its referents, and clarify whether it is anaphoric or cataphoric Besides person deixis, teacher can also guide students to do small assignments on other kinds of deixis Their own investigations enclosed with the sufficient comments and judgments of teachers are supposed to facilitate the student‟s acquisition
By carefully experiencing John Kerry‟s speech, students are believed to gradually obtain many aspects of pragmatics such as in what manner deictic expressions are used in order to create cohesion of the speech, how they are flexibly applied in an authentic speech, and why the speaker dominantly employs certain kinds of person deixis in his speech At first, students might be hesitant when they are acquired to analyze the speech since it relates to politics, the topic which is sometimes considered boring and meaningless However, with the guidance and encouragement of the teachers, students remarkably Importantly, after analyzing the speech, students to some extent can understand the perspectives of a politician and political communication, thus they can form their own opinions and judgments toward statement coming from politicians
As revealed before, owing to the limited time, knowledge and interest of the writer, this research just focuses on the use of person deixis in political speech Other types of deixis namely spatial or temporal deixis have not been analyzed
The subject of this thesis is only the person deixis, hence other kinds of deixis namely time, spatial, discourse deixis are expected to be the future work Moreover, on the way of carrying out this study, the writer finds out that social factors contribute significantly toward the formulation of the speech through the use of person deixis It is considered that analysis in the field of discourse analysis will contribute understanding toward the speech Furthermore, after this study has reached its fulfillment, the idea of conducting another research about person deixis seems to flame out in the writer Instead of analyzing one speech as in this thesis, a contrastive research can be carried out by using the debate It is expected to reveal the differences in the way each candidate employs person deixis in their utterances which might relate to their political purposes
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Remarks on Climate Change Retrieved from the World Wide Web, http://www.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2014/02/221704.htm
APPENDIX Remarks on Climate Change
Thank you, Robert Thank you very, very much I don‟t know I think some of you were cheering twice for the same university I don‟t know It seemed to come from the same place anyway
What a pleasure to be here at America, where we are looking at all of the air conditioning pipes running right through here I love it The spirit and feel of this place is very special and it‟s wonderful to see our friends up here from Kalimantan and also everybody from Sumatra Thank you very much for being with us Can you hear me? Yeah! Wave! Do a few selfies, everybody will Anyway, it‟s really a pleasure to be here I see a lot of iPads up in the air sort of flashing away
This is special Ambassador Blake, thank you for doing this Thank you all for coming here today I want to welcome all of those of you who are tuning in elsewhere, some of you who are watching on a home webcast, and we‟re delighted to have you here It‟s really a pleasure for me to be able to be back in Jakarta, back in Indonesia, where you have one of the richest ecosystems on Earth And you live in a country that is at the top of the global rankings for both marine and terrestrial biodiversity, and you have a human ecosystem that includes some 300 ethnic groups, speaking at least 700 languages – extraordinary place
But because of climate change, it is no secret that today, Indonesia is also one of the most vulnerable countries on Earth
This year, as Secretary of State, I will engage in a series of discussions on the urgency of addressing climate change – particularly on the national security implications and the economic opportunities And I want you to think about those But I wanted to start right here, in Jakarta, because this city – this country – this region – is really on the front lines you live and love is at risk So let‟s have a frank conversation about this threat and about what we, as citizens of the world, need to be able to do to address it
Some time ago I travelled to another vibrant city – a city also rich with its own rich history – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil And I was there, sitting in a big room, surrounded by representatives from about 170 countries We listened as expert after expert after expert described the growing threat of climate change and what it would mean for the world if we failed to act The Secretary General of the conference was – he was an early leader on climate change, a man by the name of Maurice Strong, and he told us – I quote him:
“Every bit of evidence I‟ve seen persuades me that we are on a course leading to tragedy.”
Well, my friends, that conference was in 1992 And it is stunning how little the conversation has really changed since then
When I think about the array of global climate – of global threats – think about this: terrorism, epidemics, poverty, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction – all challenges that know no borders – the reality is that climate change ranks right up there with every single one of them And it is a challenge that I address in nearly every single country that I visit as Secretary of State, because President Obama and I believe it is urgent that we do so