Language use of political parties over time: Stylistic Fronting in the Icelandic Gigaword Corpus

AbstractPolitical speech is an active area of investigation and the ongoing ERC project Explaining Individual Lifespan Change (EILisCh) expands on some of the previous findings in this area. Previous work has found that political speech can differ based on party membership in a time-wise static environment and it has also been uncovered that individual politicians can change their linguistic behavior over time. In this paper, we pursue a novel topic in this area, the evolution of language use of entire political parties over time. We focus on Icelandic political parties and their use of Stylistic Fronting from 1999 to 2021, with a particular emphasis on the years around the financial crisis of 2008, and the subsequent years. Our results show that parties in a position of power typically speak more formally, using more Stylistic Fronting, but that at the same time there are some exceptions to this pattern. We highlight the significance of relying on a large speech corpus, when applying a high-definition approach to linguistic analyses across time.