People in the State of the Union: Viewing Social Change through the Eyes of Presidents

Proceedings of PACLIC 19, the 19th Asia-Pacific Conference on Language, Information and Computation People in the State of the Union: Viewing Social Change through the Eyes of Presidents Kathleen Ahrens Graduate Institute of Linguistics & Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures National Taiwan University 1 Roosevelt Road, Section 4 Taipei 106, Taiwan kathleenahrens@yahoo.com Abstract On-line databases of presidential speeches now allow for a diachronic exploration of language use at the highest political levels. This allows for a contrast between legislative and legal advances for minorities and the integration of those advances into the presidential lexicon. In this paper, I explore language use pertaining to ‘people’ in the American State of the Union addresses from 1945 to 2005. I demonstrate that while there was clearly a shift two decades ago to systematically portraying human beings as being made up of two genders, or being subsumed under a gender-neutral term, other aspects of gender, such as parenthood, are still stereotyped by American presidents. In short, analyzing lexical instances related to ‘people’ in the State of the Union address allows us not only to reflect on the values held by U.S. presidents, but also to systematically uncover how they use language to exercise power on the very people they are elected to serve. 1. Introduction In the latter half of the twentieth century, American presidents have had the enviable task of shaping the way Americans think about themselves by delivering a State of the Union address near the beginning of each calendar year. This speech is broadcast live across the nation on major television and radio channels. In the address, the president emphasizes his accomplishments to date and sets out a new agenda for the year. Topics touched upon may include both foreign and domestic policy, and run the gamut from justification for war to a fervent plea to pass an education bill. The complete text of the address appears the following day in major newspapers and in on-line news resources. Thus, these addresses constitute a narrow, but influential media genre, since subsequent discourse in the news media often reports on the proposals put forth by the president in his own terminology (Barrett 2000). This terminology reflects the ideology of the ruling political party, and it is this ideology that is used to exercise power “through the manufacture of consent” (Fairclough, 2001). Moreover, as Van Dijk (1993) notes, “More control over more properties of text and context, involving more people, is thus generally (though not always) associated with more influence, and hence with hegemony” (p. 257). Thus, a linguistic analysis of presidential speeches has the potential to shed light on how the president views (and wants the country to view) economic, political and social issues of the day. However, it is only recently that the advent of on-line corpora has facilitated the collection and analysis of presidential speeches. Kowal et al. (1997), for example, had to create a corpus of Inaugural Addresses in order to look at the interaction between literacy and orality …

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