ABSTRACT
This is the first chapter to approach PDA at the lexicogrammatical level. The chapter focuses on textual resources. Political actors make use of a number of textual elements to achieve their specific purposes in a political event. One important purpose is to establish a certain relationship with the other political actors and the audience in the event. In general, this concerns the self-identification of the political actors. This self-identity can be created through a process of claiming membership and at the same time, explicitly or implicitly differentiating the ‘otherness’, that is, the creation of a ‘we’ group and simultaneously a ‘you’ group through the use of the second person. This chapter starts with a quantitative profile of the use of ‘we’ among the government officials and student representatives in the televised meeting. Then it examines the political functions of the inclusive use of ‘we’ and the exclusive use of ‘we’. However, in a complicated political event like the televised meeting, there were five individual political actors in each group, and each political actor had his or her own social and institutional role as well as his or her role in the division of labour in the team to work together to achieve their political agendas. The chapter thus investigates how the semiotic scope in the use of first personal plural pronoun ‘we’ in their discourse reflected the collective self of each political actor.
