The Pronoun ‘We’ and Ideological Commitment: A Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis of the Manifestoes of the two Major Ghanaian Political Parties

Abstract

Over the years discourse analysts have developed interest in the analysis of political discourse, often focusing on campaign messages, state of the nation address, parliamentary debates, among others. However, in the context of Ghana, previous studies have not examined the use of first-person pronouns in party manifestoes. The present study, therefore, examined the use of first-person pronouns in the 2016 manifestoes of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP), with the view to revealing the ideologies of the selected political parties. The study relied on critical discourse analysis as its theory and employed corpus-linguistic methods through the corpus-analytical software AntConc version 3.5.7 for its analysis. I found that in the NDC manifesto, the pronoun “we” was used to express future intentions, past and present deeds, beliefs, commitments, past promises as well as obligations. On the other hand, in the NPP manifesto, the pronoun “we” expressed intention, recognition, commitment, beliefs, criticism and self-praise. Crucially, while the NDC focused more on past achievements, the NPP focused on self-praise and crtitizing the incumbent administration. With regard to the second research question, it was found that the manifestoes presented promises and intentions with median commitment. This shows that with the exception of a few cases where high commitment was expressed, median commitment was dominant in the manifestoes. This study has implications for critical discourse analysis, ideology in political discourse, personal pronouns in political discourse, and corpus linguistics as an approach for critical discourse analysis.