ABSTRACT
The second chapter to approach PDA at the lexicogrammatical level, this chapter focuses on the use of interpersonal resources. The aim is to explore how the political actors’ power and institutional role are reflected in their choices of interpersonal linguistic elements in the televised meeting between the government officials and student representatives in the middle of the Umbrella Movement, and wherever necessary, comparison will be made with the data of the three candidates in a televised debate of the Chief Secretary election in 2017 to highlight the arguments. This chapter thus starts with the ‘power’ distribution among the political actors in the meeting before analyzing their contribution by turn and word in the discourse, and then how their choices of speech function, polarity, and finally modality relate to the political parties in general and to the individual political actors of each party in particular. In short, this chapter intends to explain how their discursive roles influence their linguistic choices of interpersonal linguistic elements.
