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Introduction
This article deals with the level of self-referencing in the speeches of Labour Party leaders at the annual conference, especially in the 'Parliamentary Report' and how this varies over time and between leaders. The article starts from the point of view that the extent to which politicians put themselves at the centre of their rhetoric is an important issue to consider when examining how they communicate with us. It also provides an insight into the public persona, genuine or manufactured, of politicians. This is an issue which has received some attention in academia (see, for example, Field, (2011) for a specifically political point of view; and for example, Campbell and Pennebaker (2003) and Pennebaker (2011) for the wider importance of pronoun use). Outside academia the American blogosphere is littered with analyses of, for example, Obama's use of the first person singular pronoun, usually as a means of criticising him for being overly self-centred.1
The importance of self-referencing is underscored by the attention given to the alleged 'personalisation' or 'presidentialisation' of politics (see, for example, Poguntke and Webb, 2005a, 2005b; and Karvonen, 2010).2 The supposed increasing focus on individual politicians, as opposed to organisations, policies or ideologies, is said to be having an important impact on the functioning of modern democracy. The argument goes that individual leaders are becoming more powerful and more central to how a party and its policies are viewed by the public and the media. If politics is becoming more personalised it would stand to reason that the same would be the case for speeches at the Labour Party conference. On the other hand, self-referencing may be explained more by context and personality, something suggested by the work of Pennebaker (2011). This article will therefore explore self-referencing in the speeches of Labour leaders - first through a broad view of the collective corpus of the parliamentary report or leader's speech and then by a more detailed study of a selection of party leaders' conference speeches throughout their careers, including their contribution to conference debates before becoming leader. The focus of the article will be twofold: (i) to explore how self-referencing varies in the speeches of Labour Party leaders-over time across all leaders, between the collected corpus of each...