An integrated approach of quantitative and qualitative analysis in the study of identity in speeches

Abstract

Identity is usually analysed by focusing on a single case and scrutinizing relevant text fragments. This approach rules out the possibility of doing research on larger corpora, such as my corpus of 40 speeches. To this end, an integrated approach of both quantitative and qualitative analysis is proposed here. For the quantitative method, pronouns were selected as markers of the three main types of identity in my corpus, namely that of the speaker, the audience and the company the speaker represents, the latter being the focus of this article. This institutional identity construction of the company has the highest frequency in the corpus. In order to get an in-depth insight into the strategies used to build this institutional identity, extremely institutional speeches were selected and qualitative analysis was applied to this sub-corpus. This showed that three main techniques were present here, namely identification, company presentation and the suggestion of excellence.