Synthetic Personalization of Jacinda Ardern at the 2023 Parliament Farewell Speech: A Social-Semiotic Multimodal Study
Keywords:
synthetic personalization, social-semiotic, multimodalityAbstract
Looking at how language functions differently when it is used by specific people at a certain time and agenda, this study aims to see how a specific political leader influences the audience by using certain words and gestures to engage with. The data were taken from Jacinda Ardern’s final speech in April 2023 in the parliament on YouTube as she resigned from her position as New Zealand’s Prime Minister. This study applied a descriptive-qualitative study by using qualitative library research and document analysis for the data collection. The data were analyzed using Fairclough’s (2001) theory on Synthetic Personalization and Van Leeuwen’s (2008) Social-semiotic Multimodal analysis. The findings show Jacinda Ardern used synthetic personalization to build intimacy, to engage with the audience, and to create a simulated personal relationship with the audience by telling her personal story, using specific vocabularies such as you, we, and our to build a deeper relationship with the audience resulting in the audience getting immersed during her speech and a mass standing ovation. Social-semiotic shortens the distance between speaker and audience by creating social interaction by showing gestures, eye distance, and gaze.
References
Bakar, K. A. (2014). Attitude and Identity Categorizations: A Corpus-based Study of Gender Representation. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 112(Iceepsy 2013), 747–756. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.01.1226
Bös, B. (2007). Dispensation in contemporary British newspapers: Informal reference to persons. Critical Discourse Analysis of Media Texts, 127.
Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power. Harvard University Press.
Chovanec, J. (2006). Competitive verbal interaction in online minute-by-minute match reports.
Djonov, E., & Van Leeuwen, T. (2018). Social media as semiotic technology and social practice: the case of ResearchGate’s design and its potential to transform social practice. Social Semiotics, 28(5), 641–664. https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2018.1504715
Fairclough, N. (2013). Critical discourse analysis: The critical study of language. Routledge.
Grabowski, I. (2007). Consumed by consumerism : the persuasive discourse of financial institutions. Language and Ecology, 2(2), 1–15.
Halliday, M. A. K. (2014). Language as social semiotic. The Discourse Studies Reader. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 263–272.
Kress, G. (1990). Critical discourse analysis. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 11, 84–99.
Lemke, J. L. (2021). Cognition, context, and learning: A social semiotic perspective. In Situated cognition (pp. 37–55). Routledge.
Matwick, K., & Matwick, K. (2014). Storytelling and synthetic personalization in television cooking shows. Journal of Pragmatics, 71(September 2014), 151–159. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2014.08.005
Michelson, K., & Álvarez Valencia, J. A. (2016). Study abroad: Tourism or education? A multimodal social semiotic analysis of institutional discourses of a promotional website. Discourse & Communication, 10(3), 235–256.
Özcan, F. H. (2016). Choice of address terms in conversational setting. International Journal of Human Sciences, 13(1), 982. https://doi.org/10.14687/ijhs.v13i1.3489
Page, R. (2012). The linguistics of self-branding and micro-celebrity in Twitter: The role of hashtags. Discourse and Communication, 6(2), 181–201. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750481312437441
Silverman, D. (2020). Qualitative research. sage.
Van Leeuwen, T. (2008a). Discourse and practice: New tools for critical discourse analysis. Oxford university press.
Van Leeuwen, T. (2008b). The visual representation of social actors. Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis, 136–168.
Weiss, G., & Wodak, R. (2007). Critical discourse analysis. Springer.
Wodak, R. (2004). Critical discourse analysis. Qualitative Research Practice, 185, 185–204.
Wodak, R., & Fairclough, N. (2013). Critical discourse analysis. Sage Los Angeles.
Wong, W. W. B. (2016). Synthetic personalization of Barack Obama at the 2008 US Democratic National Convention: a social semiotic multimodal analysis of a staged political context. Visual Communication, 15(4), 509–534. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470357216632164
Yoong, M., & Yoong, M. (2020). Synthetic Sisterhood in Malaysian Women’s Media. Professional Discourses, Gender and Identity in Women’s Media, 123–132.
