Bakhtinian perspectives : discourse and identity

Abstract

This paper focuses on a speech I recorded from the Sky News television channel in 2000 showing Ms. Betty Boothroyd, then Speaker of the House of Commons in Britain, engaged in her farewell speech to Parliament just before she retired from this institutional position. The last few minutes of Boothroyd';s speech are analysed through the lens of Bahktinian reasonings related to identity. I therefore explore how discourse contributes to the ongoing construction of identity of the principal participant, and how social constructs such as institutional power and control are preserved and reinforced by both agency and social role. Within a post-structuralist and a social constructionist conceptualization of subjectivity, this paper envisages a dynamic relationship between the communicative event and the context which generates it.