Icelandic MPs in crisis: Variable use of Stylistic Fronting in the linguistic aftermath of the economic crash
Case studies on individual politicians (e.g., Stefánsdóttir and Ingason 2024) have indicated that the economic crash is a historic event that affects the speech of Icelandic members of parliament (MPs), though the nature of change varies. Interestingly, the four main political parties also change systematically across this time period. In this talk, we present findings that combine both the individual lifespan and the broader political perspective and we examine new evidence on the linguistic malleability of individual MPs in the context of the more general political framework.
As part of the ERC-funded project Explaining Individual Lifespan Change (EILisCh), this study focuses on a subset of 16 MPs featured in the Icelandic Parliament Corpus (Steingrímsson, Barkarson, and Örnólfsson 2020) and considers their use of Stylistic Fronting (SF; n=15,597). This linguistic variable is an optional feature in Icelandic, indexing a more formal style (Wood 2011 inter alia). We focus on the time of the economic crash (2007-2010).
Preliminary results suggest that MPs show different linguistic reactions to political crises like the economic crash. For example, while some remain stable over this period, others increase or decrease their use of SF. Regression analyses conducted in R (R Core Team 2023) reveal that these patterns are contingent on the status of the political party (in majority or minority) and the MP’s role in parliament (minister, member).
The example of the variable use of SF by Icelandic MPs across the period of the economic crash implies that individual change can reveal as much about lifespan change as community trends (or here: the results of the four main parties). Thus, these results add valuable nuance to the question of the effect of major life events on a speaker’s linguistic performance.
References
R Core Team. 2023. “R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing.” R Foundation
for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. <https://www.R-project.org/>.
Stefánsdóttir, Lilja Björk, and Anton Karl Ingason. 2024. “Wiggly lifespan change in a crisis: Contrasting reactive and proactive identity construction.” U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 30(2): 119–125.
Steingrímsson, Steinþór, Starkaður Barkarson, and Gunnar Thor Örnólfsson. 2020. “IGC-parl: Icelandic corpus of parliamentary proceedings.” In Proceedings of the Second ParlaCLARIN Workshop, 11–17.
Wood, Jim. 2011. “Stylistic fronting in spoken Icelandic relatives.” Nordic Journal of Linguistics 34(1): 29–60.