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Abstract

Abstract

This paper examines how former Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong strategically deployed personal pronouns — especially — in National Day Rally (NDR) speeches (2004–2023) to construct authority, manage affect, and negotiate state–citizen alignment. Situated within Singapore’s hybrid political system, the study adopts a corpus pragmatic approach combining frequency analysis, collocate profiling, and a substitution-based method to track inclusive and exclusive alongside broader patterns of , , and . Informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), deixis, and modality, the analysis shows that functions as an indexical pivot modulating institutional stance around elections, milestones, and crises: exclusive dominates early speeches and reflects technocratic leadership, while inclusive forms rise during periods of public outreach and pandemic response. These findings demonstrate that pronoun choice acts as a rhetorical device for distributing agency, calibrating legitimacy, and adapting leadership style to political context.

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/content/journals/10.1075/jlp.25089.che
2025-11-25
2025-12-06

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Leadership in numbers
John Benjamins ; https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.25089.che
/content/journals/10.1075/jlp.25089.che
/content/journals/10.1075/jlp.25089.che
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keywords: political pragmatics ; personal pronouns ; corpus linguistics ; leadership discourse ; Southeast Asian politics ; deixis and modality

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