Language use of political parties over time: Stylistic Fronting in the I celandic G igaword Corpus (2025)

Abstract: Political 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.

## introduction case studies on individual politicians have indicated that historic events have an effect on political speech. for example, in previous studies on several icelandic members of parliament (mps), @xcite find that individuals employ different linguistic strategies in reaction to these events or crises. while ásmundur daðason uses significantly less stylistic fronting (sf) during a personal crisis, possibly trying to mitigate negative media coverage, steingrímur sigfússon increases his sf use temporarily during the economic crash @xcite . in addition to these individual studies which focus on lifespan change or change across time, @xcite and colleagues @xcite provide single case studies on barack obama and kamala harris, focusing on one point in time. they reveal how linguistic variation may be part of creating political personas and performances and how equally, linguistic choices may be influenced by a speaker's orientation towards a certain topic @xcite . similarly, studies on entire political parties at one time point reveal that political identity is highly relevant for linguistic production. in their study on iraq vowels of members of the u.s. house of representatives, hall-lew et al. (2010) establish that "republican party members were significantly more likely to produce the second vowel in iraq with the more nativized variant, /ae/, while members of the democratic party were more likely than republicans to use /a:/" (hall-lew et al., 2012, 47) -a finding that was substantiated in their 2012 study @xcite . the correlation between phonetic variation and political party could also be found for scottish mps @xcite . taken together, the studies above suggest that political affiliation is correlated with how speakers use linguistic variables. however, this claim has not been tested for entire political parties across time. thus, what we lack are studies on the linguistic evolution of entire political parties, highlighting changes and reactions to historic events and political crises. in this paper, we also focus on a syntactic variable, whereas most of the previous studies have focused on phonological variables. our main research question is: how do political parties react linguistically to historic events across time, measured by their use of sf? this is the novel angle we add with our research. ## background our study captures several political crises and historic events in the 21st century. it covers eleven government periods, including one minority government in @xcite , as shown in ## methods and data the data come from the icelandic parliament corpus, which is a parsed subcorpus of the icelandic gigaword corpus @xcite (for more details see @xcite . to consider more recent developments, our focus is on the time period from 1999 to 2021 or government periods 17 to 23 respectively. importantly, whereas most studies on (individual) lifespan change include two or three time points (e.g., @xcite , our continuous data set offers numerous points of measurement, making it a high-definition study @xcite . as mentioned, we consider the speech of mps only of the four main parties in iceland: the independence party, the social democratic alliance, the progressive party, and the left-green movement. the data set accounts for 324 mps, who occupied different roles in government, e.g., members or ministers. data processing relied on python scripts, utilizing the pos-tags and lemmas from the corpus to identify examples of sf (@xmath6,883) within relative clauses containing a subject gap, as well as similar instances where it could have been applied but was not, in order to determine the percentage of sf use. sf is an optional feature in icelandic, with a word or phrase moving to the subject gap positionas shown in (1) and (2) @xcite @xcite @xcite . we define the grammatical context here as sf in relative clauses with a subject gap where a finite auxiliary and a non-finite main verb appear at the beginning of the clause in two possible word orders: without sf, the auxiliary precedes the non-finite main verb (1). with sf, the non-finite main verb precedes the auxiliary (2). sf use indexes a more formal style @xcite . varðandi regarding það it [ cp sem that var was sagt said hér] here ... 'regarding what was said here ...' (2) varðandi regarding það it [ cp sem that sagt said var was hér] here ... ## results figure 1 plots the proportional use of sf for all main parties across the eleven government periods. the independence party remains linguistically stable during their time in power from 1999 (17) to @xcite . but they drastically decrease their sf use as they lose political power in the aftermath of the economic crash in @xcite . they only increase their sf use slightly, when becoming part of the governing parties again in 2013 (21), remaining relatively stable for the remainder of the time. the progressive party follows a similar trajectory to that of the independence party (figure 1 ). we attribute this finding to the fact that they are in a coalition government together for the majority of the time period under investigation @xcite ; generally, the social democratic alliance shows very similar trends, increasing their sf use when holding more political power. especially during the economic crash period and its aftermath from 2007 to 2013, when they are part of the government, they show higher sf rates than during other periods in opposition (except for 22a, where we only have low token numbers) (figure 1 ). these linguistic patterns highlight two important trends. first, they emphasize the importance of party status: when political parties hold power, they use more sf, thus they speak more formally. these results are confirmed by our regression models, selecting government period and party status as highly significant predictors and indicating highly significant differences between levels ( we should also note here that, as far as we know, sf use is not tied to specific topics, nor does it evoke certain attitudes or opinions (in contrast, e.g., to the phonetic variation studied by hall- @xcite . in our data, the role of the mp conditions sf use ( there are also exceptions to the general trend that more power equals higher sf rates, which we will exemplify by considering the linguistic trajectory of the left-green movement. while overall they pattern together with the social democratic alliance, it is surprising to find that they decrease their sf use when gaining political power in 2017 (23) (figure 1 ). this change from government period 22b to 23 is highly significant (x 2 (1, 6681)= 6.71, p<.01). their divergence from the general pattern might be explained by the unique situation the left-green movement was facing during that time. they were part of the government in 2017 ( 23 ), but they were forced to form a coalition with the independence party and the progressive party, which are on the opposing political spectrum. in response, the left-green movement was faced with criticism and unpopularity, so they might have chosen a different linguistic path in order to differentiate themselves from their "political opponents" who were nevertheless part of the same coalition government. hence, when political parties are struggling to work together, these parties may try to set themselves apart linguistically to highlight their different stance or political identity, even when they are working together in the same government. ## conclusion political parties shift their use of sf as they gain or lose political power. with more political power, the parties use more sf, and vice versa. however, as illustrated by the trajectory of the left-green movement, there are exceptions to this pattern. although party status is a main contributing factor, linguistic choices for political parties are not the result of a single factor, but are conditioned by a multifaceted, complex set of factors. by relying on extensive data from a tagged corpus, we could apply a high-definition approach to our analysis (stefánsdóttir and ingason, 2018), which revealed this intricate pattern across time. in sum, these results add a new dimension to the study of political speech by considering the language use of entire political parties across different government periods. we could highlight that political crises or historic events, such as the economic crash, can cause changes in power dynamics, which evoke linguistic reactions that are traceable for entire political parties over time.