‘Malgré la pandémie’

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of the 2021 New Year address to the nation given by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, after nine months of the COVID-19 crisis. The theoretical perspective used is systemic functional linguistics, and comparisons are made with my prior analysis of his address for the previous year. The study focuses on Macron’s use of personal pronouns. It was found that the first-person singular subject pronoun, je, occurs predominantly with mental processes, but that the plural subject pronoun, nous, occurs more frequently, and that the dominant process type is material. Further, whereas the first-person singular is rarely present other than as the subject, the first-person plural frequently occurs as a possessive. Thus, as is common in Macron’s discourse more generally, je is avoided in favour of nous, and Macron plays on the ambiguity of this pronoun to draw the public into shared responsibility for governmental policy. One difference with the 2020 address is that here he uses few expressions of modality, and these are rarely deontic (obligation), most being dynamic (physical possibility).