‘Changing Hats’ and Deixis of First-person Plural Pronouns in J.D. Vance’s 2025 Munich Speech

Abstract

Speeches of modern politicians supply linguists with the material to study how global and local political, social, cultural and economic changes are promoted or resisted in a particular context. These texts may be approached from the point of view of their linguistic structure as well as from a perspective of their embeddedness in discourse. The article explores the scope of the first-person plural pronouns as they were used by US Vice President JD Vance in his famous speech at the Munich Security Conference on February 14, 2025, so as to demonstrate the connection between the context and language forms. The study draws on the notions of personal deixis (grammatical encoding of participants in an interaction) and footing (a stance or alternating stances taken by a participant in an interaction) and hypothesizes that in Vance’s speech, the first-person plural pronouns, namely personal, possessive and reflexive types, vary in scope and include, besides the speaker, different entities, which is related to the politician’s switch of footing. The research makes use of quantitative analysis to assess the importance of the first-person plural pronouns in the speech compared to the second-person pronouns. At the next stage, contextual analysis is applied to clarify the reference scope of the first-person plural pronouns.

The study reveals a 2 to 1 ratio of the first-person pronouns (66.9%) to the second-person pronouns (33.1%). The first-person plural pronouns account for 35.6% occurrences and outnumber the first-person singular pronouns (31.3%). Accordingly, Vance’s speech focuses on the speaker. Contextual analysis uncovers that the Vice President uses the first-person plural pronouns to refer to himself and some other referent. The latter may be (1) another person (his spouse and another politician), (2) the Trump administration, (3) the American people, and (4) the USA and its allies (the EU, and the UK). Hence, it may be concluded that first-person plural pronouns facilitate the speaker’s switch of social roles in political discourse.