Speaker design practices in political discourse: A case study

This study demonstrates that traditional variationist conceptualizations of style shifting as a primarily responsive phenomenon, conditioned by matters external to the speaker such as audience and formality of the situation, are inadequate to account for all stylistic choices. The paper focuses on the unexpected (and controversial) use of features of the local dialect by a female former President of the Local Government of Murcia, in southeastern Spain. The President’s broadcast speech is compared with that of other Murcian female politicians, Murcian male politicians, Murcian non-politicians, and non-Murcian politicians. Her hyper-use of Murcian dialect features indicates that she is not shifting her speech in reaction to formality, or even in accommodation to the many Murcians in her audience (whose radio speech is more standard than her own). Rather, she is purposely designing her speech to project an image that highlights her Murcian identity and her socialist ideals. Thus, more recent conceptualizations of stylistic variation as creative and strategic, and as essential to identity projection and creation and the furthering of one’s specific situational goals, can be used to explain people’s stylistic choices even in seemingly stylistically constrained settings such as publicly broadcast political speech.