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Leadership in numbers

The pragmatics of We in Singapore’s NDR speeches (2004–2023)

ORCiD logo with link | Masaryk UniversityBrno
 | Gulf University for Science and Technology
Published online: 25 November 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.25089.che
Abstract
This paper examines how former Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong strategically deployed personal pronouns — especially we — in National Day Rally (NDR) speeches (2004–2023) to construct authority, manage affect, and negotiate state–citizen alignment. Situated within Singapore’s hybrid political system, the study adopts a corpus pragmatic approach combining frequency analysis, collocate profiling, and a substitution-based method to track inclusive and exclusive we alongside broader patterns of I, you, and they. Informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), deixis, and modality, the analysis shows that we functions as an indexical pivot modulating institutional stance around elections, milestones, and crises: exclusive we dominates early speeches and reflects technocratic leadership, while inclusive forms rise during periods of public outreach and pandemic response. These findings demonstrate that pronoun choice acts as a rhetorical device for distributing agency, calibrating legitimacy, and adapting leadership style to political context.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Background and context
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Pronouns and pragmatic function
    • 2.2Corpus pragmatics and political rhetoric
    • 2.3Methodological innovation and research gap
    • 2.4Political address as genre and strategy
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Corpus compilation
    • 3.2Personal pronoun extraction
    • 3.3Collocate profiling and pragmatic process analysis
    • 3.4Substitution-based inclusion/exclusion coding
    • 3.5Integration with political context
  • 4.Findings and discussion
    • 4.1Corpus Overview
    • 4.2Diachronic trends in pronoun use (RQ1)
    • 4.3Pragmatic functions of we + verb collocates (RQ2)
      • 4.3.1Frequency profiling
      • 4.3.2SFL-based classification
      • 4.3.3Political calibration and shifts
    • 4.4Inclusive vs. exclusive We (RQ3)
      • 4.4.1General distribution of inclusive vs. exclusive we
      • 4.4.2Diachronic trends in inclusion and exclusion
    • 4.5Political contingency and strategic voice (RQ4)
  • 5.Conclusion
  • References
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