SELF-MENTIONS IN BRITISH PRIME MINISTER’S SPEECHES ON CLIMATE CHANGE

Abstract

Background. In the United Kingdom (the UK), the issue of climate change has become a contentious problem that is regularly elucidated by the British media, the public at large, and by a number of climate change protest movements. Whilst there are competing discursive voices on climate change in the UK, it seems quite sensible to heed to the discourse on climate change by the current Labour government, which is led by Keir Starmer. Whereas his premiership is short, it seems, nevertheless, pertinent to look at Starmer’s discourse on climate change in more detail, given that Starmer determines the UK’s government policies associated with the issue of climate change. In this regard, it should be mentioned that there are several recent studies on the lexico-syntactic peculiarities of Starmer’s climate change discourse. At the same time, however, a score of other discursive and rhetorical aspects of Starmer’s discourse on climate change have not been analysed yet.

Purpose. The article involves a quantitative study that examines the frequency of self-mentions, which are manifested by the first person pronouns in Starmer’s speeches on climate change. It is argued in the study self-mentions may help to uncover the way Starmer frames the issue climate change, for instance, whether or not he presents himself as a team player, who looks at climate change as a challenge posed to the entire government and/or the entire British nation, or, alternatively, his use of self-mentions may reveal that he portrays himself as the sole fighter against the negative consequences of climate change. In this light, the study aims at answering the following research question: What is the frequency of self-mentions (i.e., “I”, “my”, “me”, “mine”, “myself”, “we”, “our”, “us”, “ours”, and “ourselves”) in Keir Starmer’s political speeches on climate change?

Methods. Methodologically, the study involves a quantitative procedure of computing the frequency of self-mentions in the corpus. To that end, the computer program AntConc is used in order to calculate the total number of occurrences of self-mentions in the corpus. To do so, Starmer’s speeches in corpus are processed separately in AntConc and, thereafter, the means and standard deviations of each type of self-mentions are computed. 

Results. The results of the corpus analysis reveal that Starmer’s speeches on the issue of climate change involve the following types of self-mentions: “I”, “me”, “my”, “myself”, “we”, “us”, “our”, and “ourselves”. Judging from these findings, Starmer and/or his speechwriters do not employ the self-mentions “mine” and “ours”, respectively. Instead, they seem to capitalise on the frequent use of the self-mentions “we”, “our”, and “I”.

Discussion. The self-mention “we” both in absolute values and in normalised values per 1 000 words is the most frequently occurring self-mention in the corpus. This finding lends indirect support to the prior literature (Abdulla & Ahmed, 2024; Junianto, 2025; Liu, 2024; Phanthaphoommee & Munday, 2024; Romadlani, 2024; Williams & Wright, 2024), which posits that “we” seems to be a highly frequent self-mention in political discourses, especially in the Anglophone ones. “We” is employed by Starmer in its exclusive form rather often. In this regard, the literature (Hyland, 2001, 2002, 2004; Kapranov, 2024c) distinguishes between two forms of the self-mention “we”, the so-called inclusive “we” and exclusive “we”, respectively. The inclusive “we” presupposes such communicative situations, in which the speaker involves the addressee into the same domain, i.e. creates discursive togetherness with the audience, in which the speaker and the audience are treated as one collective body of people. In contrast to the inclusive “we”, the exclusive “we” pertains to such communicative situations, in which the speaker does not involve the addressee into the “communal we”, but emphasises the fact that the speaker and the group of people that the speaker represents are not the same as the addressee, i.e. the speaker is different from the audience. Starmer’s use of the exclusive “we” is evident from the corpus, in which nearly all of the instances of “we” are exclusive.