"We are Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians": pronouns as indices of (supra)national and individual identities in presidential rhetoric in the Baltic states
ENThe paper examines pronominal indexing in presidential speeches in Latvia during the years 1919–2019 and in Estonia and Lithuania during the years 1991–2019. The study focuses on those cases when pronouns function not only as means of communication, but also as social indices that help express diverse social systems, from individual to national and even supranational identities. Personal pronouns such as I vs. you and we vs. they are used to show relations between ingroups and outgroups, as well as to mark the shift of responsibility, while adverbs of spatiality and time such as here vs. there and now vs. then show how identity is constructed in relation to common histories and common territorial boundaries. This study looks at the concept of identity as a collective sense of belonging (be it national identity or supranational (European) identity) and at the ways of expressing it through a deliberate choice of pronouns and deictic mapping. It is concluded that the presidents of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania use pronouns to express the national identities of their states, as well as the common Baltic identity and the common supranational (European) identity. This is done by using the inclusive and exclusive pronoun we in contrast to the pronoun they, as well as the adverbs marking proximity here and in contrast to distance there. The presidents tend to use the pronoun we with a relatively higher frequency than other types of deictic references that reflect identities.The presidents of Estonia use this pronoun inclusively not only to show the unity between the citizens of the state (or the EU) and the president, but also to shift from personal to shared responsibility for specific statements and actions. The presidents of Latvia and Lithuania use the pronoun we less frequently; however, they use the first-person singular pronoun I relatively more often in their speeches than the presidents of Estonia. Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis, corpus tools, deictic mapping, pronouns, national identity. [From the publication]
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