Who is the true American ? : personal pronouns as indicators of identity in Fareed Zakaria’s "an Immigrant’s Faith"

Abstract EN

This paper is an attempt to highlight the pragmatic nature of personal pronouns and how they can be manipulated by language users.

It is a pragmatic analysis of a written discourse, namely an article written by Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek on September 27, 2001.

His article “An Immigrant’s Faith” is actually a response to angry notes he received in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 claiming that a true American is a native-born and not an immigrant.

The analysis of Zakaria’s article relies on Wilson’s (1990) scale of pronominal distribution.

The use of this scale shows that Zakaria took advantage of two important features of personal pronouns which are their ability to express inclusion/exclusion and proximity/ distance.

He is found, on the one hand, to include himself in and express proximity to an American identity which, he believes, should include all Americans regardless of their belongings and the time of their arrival to the USA.

On the other hand, he is found to express distance from an identity that is defined by birth.