Interpersonal Meaning in Political Slogans (1990–2024): A Cross-National SFL Analysis of Western and South Asian Countries

Abstract

Political slogans are short, politically powerful expressions that are commonly used to express an ideological position, to mobilize people from various parts of the nation for electoral engagement, and to create a sense of national identity. This study investigates the interpersonal metafunction of political slogans based on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The 120 political slogans from selected western countries (the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and France) and South-Asian countries (Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh) were collected spanning the period from 1990 to 2024. This study focuses on the ways in which interpersonal meaning emerges as a function of the choice of mood, modality, appraisal resources, polarity, engagement and graduation in the dataset. The findings indicate that minor clauses, monoglossic engagement, force-based graduation and positive polarity are prominent interpersonal resources across the corpus. The analysed Western slogans show a greater inclination towards minor-clause constructions, collective identity, and focus-based graduation, whereas the selected South Asian slogans tend to make greater use of declarative and imperative structures, obligation-oriented modulation, leader–audience alignment, and welfare-oriented appreciation. These findings suggest that the analysed slogans from Western countries build power, policy direction and institutional stability, following the propositional assertiveness of liberal democratic language. On the other hand, slogans from South Asian countries serve to build solidarity, emotional involvement and charismatic leadership. Furthermore, the study integrates the use of the UAM Corpus Tool with corpus-based method of cross-national comparison to highlight the use of interpersonal linguistic resources for relationship construction, power expression and ideology communication in distinct political contexts.