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Ours and Yours: A Discourse Analysis of Political Identity Markers in Slovenian Parliamentary Discourse

With recent enrichments of the ParlaMint corpora, new opportunities have emerged for examining a range of political and discursive phenomena. This paper utilises the Slovenian ParlaMint corpus to investigate the construction of political identities through the possessive pronouns ’our’ (slv. naš) and ’your’ (slv. vaš) in Slovenian parliamentary discourse. The analysis uses a corpus-assisted approach, combining text-type, collocation, and keyword analyses of the lemmas naš and vaš. The data are drawn from three subcorpora compiled from speeches of Members of Parliament: (1) Our, containing speeches in which naš occurs; (2) Your, containing speeches in which vaš occurs; and (3) Our&Your, containing speeches in which both lemmas co-occur within the same sentence. The results indicate a clear alignment with established patterns of positive self-representation and negative other-representation. Occurrences of ’our’ are predominantly associated with positively evaluative discourse, with Norms & Values emerging as a central category. In contrast, occurrences of ’your’ are more typically linked to negative sentiment and keywords, with Activities/Discourse identified as the most prominent category. These findings suggest that these possessive pronouns function as markers of ideological positioning and discursive polarisation in Slovenian parliamentary debates.