Political personalisation in Hungarian state-of-the-nation speeches

Abstract

The examination of political personalisation has recently come to the fore in the international literature as a result of the general finding that politicians increasingly highlight their own personality instead of political groups, i.e. politics is becoming increasingly person-centred (Rahat–Kenig 2018; Szabó 2020, 2021, 2022a, 2022b). The study reflects on this issue by adopting the background assumptions of functional pragmatics, interpreting the phenomenon of personalisation within the scope of social deixis (Tátrai 2017). It is a linguistic tool for the social construction of power relations created within the framework of public discourses, which is created primarily using first-person linguistic forms (Ballagó 2024; Liu 2022). However, it is not only the ratio of 1Sg and 1Pl that is decisive, but it is also important what function person-marking forms fulfil in the discourse, determined by the context: for example, in the case of 1Pl, at what distance are the persons who can be interpreted as a group from the speaker (cf. Szabó 2022a, 2022b), and with 1Sg, to what extent forms appear in a discourse-organizing, metapragmatic function. The investigation is based on four Hungarian state-of-the-nation speeches, 10 years apart from the same two leading political actors. After the transcription and annotation, the analysis identified the functions of the person-marking utterances based on the context, and distinguished gradualism accordingly. The main research question was the following: To what extent do first-person singular and first-person plural person markers compare to each other in these Hungarian politicians’ state-of-the-nation addresses over the interval of roughly 10 years? The qualitative examination carried out with detailed analysis shows that the level of personalisation is relatively low in all four speeches, and no growth can be detected over time. This can be explained by the speech genre as a genre-specific characteristic.