Metadiscourse Functions in Political Speeches: A Study of Three Leaders’ National Addresses

Abstract

This study employs discourse analysis and corpus analysis to investigate the use of reflexive metadiscourse in national addresses delivered by three national leaders, one from Thailand, one from Myanmar, and one from Pakistan, during periods of democratic reform in their respective countries. The corpus of 129,460 running words was constructed by randomly selecting fifteen addresses from each of the leaders’ national address pools. The corpus was analyzed and coded with tags to classify the metadiscourse functions employed by the speakers, and the taxonomy proposed by Ädel (2010) was adapted to serve as the framework for analysis. The search terms “I” and the inclusive “we,” “you,” “let me,” and “let us” were used in screening non-reflexive sentences. The study found that sixteen metadiscourse functions from Ädel’s (2010) taxonomy are present in the corpus, and that 314 (4.09%) of the 7,663 sentences in the corpus have reflexive metadiscourse functions. The study also found significant use of the ‘elaborating’ function, which signals the audience that the speaker is about to elaborate on the current topic and/or emphasize a particular aspect thereof. This function was previously considered an ‘other speech act labelling’ function.