Putting negotiation on a ‘principal-ed’ footing: A corpus-informed discourse analysis of person deixis in diplomatic debates
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article investigates identity politics in diplomatic negotiations at the United Nations. Drawing on theories of ‘footing’, ‘positioning’ and ‘stance’ and applying corpus-informed discourse analysis, it examines how and why diplomats animate and laminate different selves and identifications within debates about multilingualism between 1995 and 2022. The paper focuses on the strategic enactment of politically recognisable identities indexed via first-person pronouns. Findings reveal that those holding the same stance (e.g., voting in favour, against, or abstaining in the 1995 Multilingualism Resolution) show clear patterns of deictic anchorage in their adoption of certain positions over others. Speakers adopt footings strategically and systematically via iterative and accretive processes of pronoun and verb selection to balance competing needs and perspectives relating to their own positionality (as members of the UN, representatives of their member states, or members within alliances) and in relation to domestic and international affairs. “We” is enacted in different ways by diplomats for the rhetorical purposes of “synthetic deixis” (when speaking as a principal of the UN as an organizational body), and/or to delineate their views from those of other member states (when speaking as a principal of their political alliance or nation). The “lamination” of multiple identifications and the use of “wandering we” reveals the speaker as multiply embedded within, and speaking on behalf of, different communities and political affiliations on a variety of issues. Shifts in footing permit diplomats to navigate sensitive issues, orient to self and collective/shared interests and minimise differences, whilst also demonstrate authority and legitimacy. • Examines the enactment of identity politics in the genre of diplomatic debate. • Identifies discursive strategies in negotiations when speakers straddle positions. • XML tags offer an innovative methodology for investigations of negotiation. • Lamination of “we” reveals speaker embeddedness in different political communities. • Shows how personal pronouns and verb phrases denote stances on political issues.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it