On The Personal Pronoun 'we' Language Of The Effectiveness Of Critical Analysis

In both spoken and written languages, people frequently use the first person plural form we. Most of the previous studies on 'we' rightly explain the use of the pronoun from a sociolinguistic point of view in the tradition started by Brown and Gilman(1960). This thesis is intended to be another study in this tradition, but this time we will focus on the use of the pronoun 'we' in a particular type of discourse, that is, in political discourse. Based on the Fairclough's three dimensional theory and Halliday's interpersonal function, the paper tries to reconstruct a critical framework for the analysis of the pronoun we: from semantic level, from conversational level and from social context level. Critical discourse analysis (Abbreviated to CDA), a recent school of discourse analysis, concerns itself with language, power and ideology and their interrelationships. The study tries to disclose the power of the first person plural form 'we'. From semantic level, it can be divided into royal we, rhetorical we, party we, public we, ambiguous we, each symbolizing different power. From conversational level, as communication is an ideological act, discourse is laden with illocutionary force. Power of 'we' is presented through the implicit illocutionary force. From the social and cognitive level, the elements in society such as institution can endow the pronoun 'we' with certain power.I select about 15 pieces of interviews from the VOA , BBG, CNN as the data. I mainly use the quality analysis method and a little of quantity analysis to analyze the data. From the study, it can be seen that the power of pronoun we includes: Politicians are inclined to use the plural form 'we' to express such kind of meanings as: getting people's support; building authority over others; shielding responsibility; expressing certain meaning. There are many factors that affect the exercise of the power of 'we', such as distance social or mental, the larger distance is, the more powerful we may be.And institution, the more institutionalized the discourse is, the more powerful we becomes and the more hierarchic the relationship gets; and those who want to hightlight himself or herself are inclined to use I, and those who want to convey power of a whole entity ususally choose to use 'we' to exercise power over others in political discourse. Also, the power of we by women is usually less powerful than that of men.This could also lead us to the discovery of any possible strategic use of this personal pronoun.