Constructing Collective Agency through “We”: A Corpus-Assisted Analysis of Modality in ASEAN Member States' UN General Debate Speeches
Abstract
The first-person plural pronoun “we” is a flexible linguistic resource in diplomatic discourse because it can represent collective actors at various scales. Although previous research has discussed political “we”, modality, solidarity, and identity in United Nations discourse, there is still limited understanding of how referential scale and modal meaning interact in constructing collective agency in individual ASEAN member states. This study uses Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) to analyze 92 United Nations General Debate statements from ten ASEAN member states during the period 2015–2024. The corpus consists of 159,857 word tokens and yields 2,361 attributable occurrences of “we”, 738 validated modalized-“we“constructions, and 643 actionive agency-core constructions. Referential scope is classified as national, regional, coalitional, global, generic, or ambiguous, while contextual modal meanings are classified as obligation/necessity, capacity/ability, commitment/volition, and epistemic/prediction. The results show that national and global “we” dominate resolved references, while explicitly regional ASEAN “we” is very rare. Obligation/necessity comprises 60.84% of modalized constructions. Global “we” is highly concentrated on obligation (73.28%), while national “we” shows a much greater commitment orientation (29.52% compared to 6.34% for global “we”). The association between national/global reference and modal function is significant, χ²(3) = 73.27, p < .001, Cramér's V = .325. These findings suggest that collective agency is scalar: global collectivities are primarily constructed as actors bearing shared obligations, while national collectivities are more readily constructed as actors making commitments to their own actions.
Downloads
References
Adams, T., & Mitrani, M. (2024). Juggling identities: Identification, collective memory, and practices of self-presentation in the United Nations General Debate. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 26(2), 277–298. https://doi.org/10.1177/13691481231156906
Almazán Ruiz, E., & Orrequia-Barea, A. (2024). A corpus study of Brexit political discourse: Exploring modality through lexical modals. Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies, 70, 67–92. https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.20249837
Aras, B., Dagci, K., & Al-Khulaifi, K. A. (2025). The heartbeat of unity: Exploring solidarity in the Trans-Atlantic, Asia, and Muslim world. Journal of Peacebuilding \& Development, 20(1), 69–85. https://doi.org/10.1177/15423166251317941
Association of Southeast Asian Nations. (2025). Chairman’s Statement of the 47th ASEAN Summit, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 26 October 2025.
Baturo, A., Dasandi, N., & Mikhaylov, S. J. (2017). Understanding state preferences with text as data: Introducing the UN General Debate corpus. Research \& Politics, 4(2), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053168017712821
Brun-Mercer, N. (2021). Women and men in the United Nations: A corpus analysis of General Debate addresses. Discourse \& Society, 32(4), 443–462. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926521992145
Chelotti, N., Dasandi, N., & Mikhaylov, S. J. (2022). Do intergovernmental organizations have a socialization effect on member state preferences? Evidence from the UN General Debate. International Studies Quarterly, 66(1), sqab069. https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqab069
Gao, F., & Wang, B. (2024). Reconstructing solidarity discourse through conference interpreting at the general debates of the United Nations (2008--2021). The Translator, 30(4), 553–570. https://doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2024.2367275
Gillings, M., Mautner, G., & Baker, P. (2023). Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009168144
Guliashvili, N. (2023). National identity revisited: Deictic WE in President Zelenskyy’s speeches on Russia-Ukraine war. Journal of Language and Politics, 22(6), 779–801. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.22106.gul
Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. (2014). Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar (4th ed.). Routledge.
Hecht, C. (2026). Dynamics of salient normative status dimensions and issues in a changing international order. Global Constitutionalism, 15(1), 33–61. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2045381725000073
Hecht, C., & Steffek, J. (2024). Salient discourses in international society: When and how have United Nations global conferences acted as catalysts? Journal of International Relations and Development, 27(3), 283–314. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-024-00324-7
Heinrich, P., & Evert, S. (2024). Operationalising the hermeneutic grouping process in corpus-assisted discourse studies. Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Linguistics for the Political and Social Sciences, 33–44.
Jankin, S., Baturo, A., & Dasandi, N. (2025). Words to unite nations: The complete United Nations General Debate Corpus, 1946--present. Journal of Peace Research, 62(4), 1339–1351. https://doi.org/10.1177/00223433241275335
Kentikelenis, A., & Voeten, E. (2021). Legitimacy challenges to the liberal world order: Evidence from United Nations speeches, 1970--2018. The Review of International Organizations, 16, 721–754. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-020-09404-y
Lan, L., & Mehta, C. M. (2022). Constructing collective agency through narrative positioning in group meetings within a Chinese professional team. Language \& Communication, 87, 179–190. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2022.07.008
Legiansyah, G., Darmayanti, N., & Citraresmana, E. (2025). Examining ``we’’ and modality as ideological practice in opening speeches of Asian-African Conference: A critical discourse analysis. Law and Humanities Quarterly Reviews, 4(3), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.31014/aior.1996.04.03.151
Liu, N. (2023). Speaking in the first-person singular or plural: A multifactorial, speech corpus-based analysis of institutional interpreters. Interpreting, 25(2), 239–273. https://doi.org/10.1075/intp.00088.liu
Liu, R.-Y. (2024). Constituting institutional identity in political discourse: The use of the first-person plural pronoun in China’s press conferences. Language in Society, 53(3), 421–444. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404523000386
McEntee-Atalianis, L., & Vessey, R. (2025). Putting negotiation on a `principal-ed’ footing: A corpus-informed discourse analysis of person deixis in diplomatic debates. Journal of Pragmatics, 247, 42–56. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2025.07.013
Orrequia-Barea, A., & Almazán Ruiz, E. (2021). Modelling through modality: (Re)shaping Brexit. ES Review. Spanish Journal of English Studies, 42, 127–153. https://doi.org/10.24197/ersjes.42.2021.127-153
Palmer, F. R. (2001). Mood and Modality (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Partington, A., Duguid, A., & Taylor, C. (2013). Patterns and Meanings in Discourse: Theory and Practice in Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS). John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.55
Rattanasevee, P. (2023). Understanding and prospect of identity construction in ASEAN integration. International Studies, 60(4), 379–400. https://doi.org/10.1177/00208817231213500
Rehbein, I., Ruppenhofer, J., & Bernauer, J. (2021). Who is we? Disambiguating the referents of first person plural pronouns in parliamentary debates. Proceedings of the 17th Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS 2021), 147–158.
Shen, L., & Kotze, H. (2025). Linguistic indicators differentiating translated and untranslated diplomatic discourse: A diachronic analysis of the United Nations General Debate (1946--2022). Lingua, 320, 103933. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103933
Shteynberg, G., Hirsh, J. B., Garthoff, J., & Bentley, R. A. (2022). Agency and identity in the collective self. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 26(1), 35–56. https://doi.org/10.1177/10888683211065921
Williams, J., & Wright, D. (2024). Ambiguity, responsibility and political action in the UK daily COVID-19 briefings. Critical Discourse Studies, 21(1), 76–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2022.2110132
Zhang, C., Zhao, R., & Huang, Y. (2025). The evolution of ASEAN’s language policies: A diachronic analysis of official documents and website. PLOS ONE, 20(1), e0315076. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0315076
Zhang, Y., & Cheung, A. K. F. (2022). A corpus-based study of modal verbs in Chinese--English governmental press conference interpreting. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 1065077. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1065077