Personal Pronoun Analysis on Abraham Lincoln’s Selected Speeches Could Indicate Effectiveness of
Speech Writing
Abraham Lincoln is known by consensus as the best president of the United States and he is known by his recognizable skills in speaking. Not only in speaking is he recognized but also in his writing. For this reason, text-analysis can be applied to his speeches to find whether his use of personal pronouns have a significant effect on the overall impression of his political speeches. In order to do that, a text analysis tool was used to identify the concordance of the corpora constructed from 11 of his randomly-selected speeches. The personal pronouns were identified and categorized into three groups: gender-associative pronouns, self-inclusive pronouns, and self-exclusive pronouns. The analysis showed that there is a high level usage of self-inclusive pronouns with a relevance rate of 42.48% while the self-exclusive pronoun usage played a significant rate of 35.82%. Similar studies suggest that although deep analysis is needed for more accurate interpretation, the use of personal pronouns could affect the effectiveness of political speeches.