Metadiscourse Functions in Political Speeches: A Study of Three Leaders’ National Addresses

This study employs discourse analysis and corpus to investigate the use of reflexive metadiscourse in national addresses delivered by three leaders, one from Thailand, Myanmar, Pakistan, during periods democratic reform their respective countries. The 129,460 running words was constructed randomly selecting fifteen each leaders’ address pools. analyzed coded with tags classify functions employed speakers, taxonomy proposed Ädel (2010) adapted serve as framework for analysis. search terms “I” inclusive “we,” “you,” “let me,” us” were used screening non-reflexive sentences. found that sixteen Ädel’s are present corpus, 314 (4.09%) 7,663 sentences have functions. also significant ‘elaborating’ function, which signals audience speaker is about elaborate on current topic and/or emphasize a particular aspect thereof. function previously considered an ‘other speech act labelling’ function.