Style-Shifting in the U.S. Congress: The foreign (a) vowel in "Iraq(i)"

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This is a pre-proof version of: Hall-Lew, Lauren, Rebecca L. Starr and Elizabeth Coppock. 2012. Style-
Shifting in the U.S. Congress: The vowels of “Iraq(i)”. In Juan Manuel Hernndez Campoy and Juan
Antonio Cutillas Espinosa, eds. Style-Shifting in Public: New Perspectives on Stylistic Variation.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 45-63.

Style-Shifting in the U.S. Congress: The foreign (a) vowel in
“Iraq(i)”

Lauren Hall-Lew (University of Edinburgh)
Rebecca L. Starr (Stanford University)
Elizabeth Coppock (Lund University)

1. INTRODUCTION

Political speeches represent one of the more “highly constrained stylistic contexts”
(Hernández Campoy & Cutillas Espinosa, in this volume) of public performance. While
political speeches do not differ from other public speaking contexts in all respects, certain
aspects of this genre set it apart. In the United States, members of Congress are under
particular pressure to demonstrate that they understand and empathize with the concerns
of their constituencies, a stance which is communicated in part by embodied verbal
performances of the expression of those concerns. At the same time, congressional
representatives must strike a balance between presenting an independence of opinion that
is faithful to their constituents’ interests and (to varying degrees) aligning themselves
with the positions of the broader political party. This, along with the televised and
accessible nature of members’ speeches, suggests that moments of style-shifting may
become especially salient to listeners. Subtle shifts may acquire more accessible social
meaning, and, in turn, the social meaning of variables is shaped by these highly
constrained public contexts.
This paper examines the pronunciation of the second1 vowel of Iraq(i) as a
resource for the expression of political identity among members of the U.S. House of
Representatives. This vowel, which varies between /æ/ and /a:/ (where /a:/ represents /ah/
in the North American variationist transcription system; see Boberg (2009) for an
overview of the relevant variants). The loanword variant occurs not only in Iraq(i) but
also in many other politically important place names (Vietnam2, Iran, etc.). This

1
The first vowel in Iraq(i) is also often identified as a salient social marker, the common intuition being
that the /ay/ pronunciation corresponds to a conservative viewpoint while the /i/ or /I/ pronunciation
corresponds to a liberal viewpoint (cf. Silva et al. 2011). While we found evidence in a separate media
study (Starr, Coppock & Hall-Lew, in preparation) suggesting that the /ay/ pronunciation is associated
with the military, confirmed by Silva et al. (2011), we did not find any correlation between
pronunciation of the first vowel and political affiliation in the present study of politicians' speech.
2
The word Vietnam and its (a) vowel is arguably the 1960s and 1970s counterpart to Iraq(i). Published
analysis of the social meaning of that vowel is scant, but one example is found in the work of David
Samuels, published in the analysis of Feld et al. (2005). In this excerpt, an Apache country-western
singer covers a song by Steve Earle, “Copperhead Road,” which includes a rhyme that is dependent on
singing Vietnam with the /æ/ vowel. The singer, who enjoys the music but does not identify with the

particular vowel variation, which appears in approximately 10,000 English loanwords
(Boberg 1997), is associated with notions of correctness and education in U.S. English
(Boberg 1997; 1999) and increasingly so in Canadian English (Boberg 2000; 2009).
Boberg, who dubs this variation ‘foreign (a)’, finds that its variation in U.S. English is
predictable based on attitudinal rather than phonological factors (the latter determining
pronunciation in British English varieties). Specifically, U.S. English speakers evaluated
/a:/ to be “more correct, educated, and sophisticated than /æ/,” due to prestige acquired
through its association with “the stereotypical social attributes of speakers of dialects in
which it does occur, most notably British Received Pronunciation and the speech of
Boston ‘Brahmins”’ (Boberg 1999:49,57).
Another explanation for this association between /a:/ and ‘correctness’ is put
forth by Weinreich (1968:27), who suggests that loanwords originating in source
languages with “cultural or social prestige” may be produced by speakers of the
borrowing language with increased attention to the source language phonology than
would be given to languages with less prestige. Although Weinreich’s argument was
based on the prestige of individual languages, we can take it as motivation to consider the
ways in which individual speakers may adopt varying levels of attention to the source
language pronunciations of loanwords as a general class of words. This is based on the
observation that, due to its cross-linguistic typological frequency, /a:/ is considered by
speakers of U.S. English to be a more ‘foreign’-sounding vowel than /æ/, such that the
use of /a:/ is perceived as being more faithful to foreign language pronunciation,
regardless of the actual sound system of the foreign language in question (cf. Boberg
2009:362). It is likely that the associations between /a:/ and ‘correct, educated and
sophisticated’ emerge from both sources: the association with prestigious varieties of
English, and the perceived association with similarity of production to a foreign language
source. In terms of political speech, we argue that Democrats are more likely to orient
favorably toward both of these associations than Republicans.
Democrats and Republicans have been found to differ with respect to attitudes
(Green et al. 2002), ideological representations (Abramowitz & Saunders 2006), and
social value systems (Conover & Feldman 1981; Farwell & Weiner 2000). Two qualities
of foreign (a) can be seen to predict variation in pronunciation with respect to political
party affiliation. The first quality is the prestige that Democratic ideology assigns to
being ‘educated’. This high valuation of education may draw some individuals to the
Democratic Party regardless of their political views; Branton (2003) found a positive
correlation between Americans’ level of education and their tendency to vote liberal and
Democrat, and Rockey (2010) argues that, based on a broad study across 85 countries,
individuals with relatively higher levels of education believe themselves to be left-wing,
in spite of holding right-wing stances on particular issues. The second quality of
Democratic ideology is a positive evaluation of foreign pronunciations and, more
generally, foreign perspectives. Among other influences, Democrats may be expected to
value foreign experience more than Republicans due in part to simple exposure. Bourhis

social personae indexed by the Southern phonology, strongly resists changing from /a/ to /æ/, despite
“sacrificing the rhyme – and also, in a sense, the cultural identification of the character” (Feld et al.
2005:339).

et al. (2009:447) note, “on average Democratic candidates tend to be more liberal
regarding immigration, whereas Republicans tend to be more conservative and restrictive
toward immigration/integration issues.” A comparison between Republican-dominant
counties with Democratic-dominant counties (Doherty 2006) found a significant
difference in the proportion of foreign-born residents, with 7% in Republican counties,
overall, versus 17% of the residents in Democratic counties. Living in an area with a
higher proportion of foreign-born residents renders one more likely to encounter and
become more familiar with non-native speech varieties.
In light of these very general differences between Democrats and Republicans, we
argue that variation in foreign (a) is a good index in U.S. English for a speaker’s political
stance, particularly in public registers of speech, and particularly when the vowel occurs
in loanwords or place names that are politically charged, such as Iraq(i). In this chapter,
we further argue that these ideological associations, in combination with the relatively
equal phonological acceptability of both /æ/ and /a:/ forms in U.S. English, renders
foreign (a) variation a prime candidate for intraspeaker style-shifting. We make this point
despite previous research showing that Americans, overall, favor the use of /æ/ for the
second vowel in Iraq. Our prior analysis of the U.S. House of Representatives (Hall-Lew
et al., 2010), Boberg’s (2009) analysis of 22 American students at McGill University (in
Canada), and Silva, et al.’s (2011) analysis of 600 community members in Arlington,
Texas, all found that the majority of speakers used /æ/ rather than /a:/ when pronouncing
Iraq. But although /æ/ may be the current norm, the amount of variation in the use of /a:/,
and its known ideological associations, suggest that it is a particularly valuable stylistic
resource, and perhaps increasingly so. Further evidence for the rise of /a:/ as standard
comes from a separate study by the authors (Starr, Coppock & Hall-Lew, in preparation)
which compares pronunciations of Iraq(i) by news anchors and reporters from FoxNews
television and National Public Radio. While we find no overall difference between the
two media sources, news anchors on both networks, who are more invested in speech
standardness, consistently used the /a:/ variant of Iraq(i), while correspondent reporters in
the field were more likely to use the /æ/ variant.
The analysis given in this chapter elaborates on Hall-Lew, Coppock and Starr
(2010), which found that, among the members of the U.S. House of Representatives in
February 2007, Republican Party members were significantly more likely to produce the
second vowel in Iraq with the more nativized variant, /æ/, while members of the
Democratic Party were more likely than Republicans to use /a:/. This result held even
when controlling for regional accent, region of representation, and other factors such as
ethnicity, sex, and age.
While 86% of the 259 speakers consistently used one or the other variant, 14%, or
36 of those speakers, varied between /æ/ and /a:/, even in the course of one three-minute
speech. In this paper we give particular attention to this intraspeaker variation by
focusing on those speakers’ stance-taking at those moments of shift. One source of
intraspeaker variation is between the nominal place name (Iraq) form and the ethnonymic
or adjectival (Iraqi) forms. We find that the /æ/ variant is more likely to occur with the
place name than with the latter, suggesting a wider pattern where speakers’ use of /a:/
reflects a stance emphasizing sympathy toward the Iraqi people. This chapter concludes

with the assertion that the patterns for both interspeaker and intraspeaker variation in the
second vowel in Iraq(i) show one way in which the ‘foreign (a)’ variable (Boberg 1997)
is an available resource for style-shifting in public, and that members of the U.S. House
can draw on the indexicality of this particular variable to negotiate their political stance.

2. METHODS

A thorough description of methods of data collection and analysis can be found in Hall-
Lew, Coppock and Starr (2010). The data analyzed in this chapter come from televised
speeches made by 259 members of the U.S. House of Representatives in February 2007.
Each speech argued for or against a resolution to oppose ‘the surge’, a proposal from
President George W. Bush to increase the number of combat troops in Iraq. The 259
speakers were those (of the 307 who made speeches) who uttered the keyword, Iraq, a
minimum of three times. Each speaker was coded for party affiliation (152 Democrat,
107 Republican) and stance on the resolution (161 anti-surge, 98 pro-surge). Each
speaker’s ethnicity, age, and gender were also coded. Region (Census 2007) and
Southern/non-Southern accent (identified as the presence or absence of /ay/-
monophthongization in closed syllables; Labov et al. 2006:146, 246) were coded and
tested for. In keeping with the findings of Boberg (1997), Hall-Lew, Coppock and Starr
(2010) also found no regional or dialectal influence on the pronunciation of Iraq.

3. RESULTS: STYLE-SHIFTING IN THE HOUSE

The present analysis focuses on the 14% of the 259 speakers, or 36 total speakers, who
used at least one occurrence of both /æ/ and /a:/ for either Iraq or Iraqi in the speech they
gave in this corpus. Tables 1a and 1b list these 36 Representatives and their rates of
variable use for the second vowel in Iraq(i). Not all 36 speakers were variable for both
Iraq (Table 1a) and Iraqi (Table 1b); i.e., some were consistent for one, but not the
other).

Table 1a: Representatives who varied the 2nd vowel in Iraq

speaker party stance state /a:/.IRAQ /æ/.IRAQ Total % /æ/.IRAQ
Adam Putnam Rep pro-surge FL 1.0 3.0 4 75
Baron Hill Dem anti-surge IN 1.0 7.0 8 87.5
Bill Pascrell Jr. Dem anti-surge NJ 4.0 1.0 5 20
Bob Etheridge Dem anti-surge NC 5.0 4.0 9 44
Brad Sherman Dem anti-surge CA 1.0 8.0 9 89
Carol Shea-Porter Dem anti-surge NH 2.0 1.0 3 33
Dan Boren Dem anti-surge OK 1.0 10.0 11 91
Dan Lungren Rep pro-surge CA 2.0 16.0 18 89
David Price Dem anti-surge NC 10.0 7.0 17 41
Elton Gallegly Rep pro-surge CA 11.0 4.0 15 27
George Miller Dem anti-surge CA 1.0 4.0 5 80
Jason Altmire Dem anti-surge PA 12.0 1.0 13 8

This is a pre-proof version of: Hall-Lew, Lauren, Rebecca L. Starr and Elizabeth Coppock. 2012. Style-
Shifting in the U.S. Congress: The vowels of “Iraq(i)”. In Juan Manuel Hernndez Campoy and Juan
Antonio Cutillas Espinosa, eds. Style-Shifting in Public: New Perspectives on Stylistic Variation.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 45-63.

        Jim Langevin        Dem     anti-surge     RI      2.0        10.0        12      84
        John Shadegg        Rep     pro-surge      AZ      12.0       2.0         14      14
        Kay Granger         Rep     pro-surge      TX      4.0        17.0        21      81
        Lois Capps          Dem     anti-surge     CA      8.0        10.0        18      56
        Loretta Sanchez     Dem     anti-surge     CA      14.0       1.0         15      67
        Michael Arcuri      Dem     anti-surge     NY      8.0        2.0         10      20
        Mike Honda          Dem     anti-surge     CA      8.0        1.0         9       11
        Norm Dicks          Dem     anti-surge     WA      17.0       1.0         18      6
        Paul Hodes          Dem     anti-surge     NH      9.0        3.0         12      25
        Richard Hastings    Rep     pro-surge      WA      1.0        7.0         8       88
        Rick Renzi          Rep     pro-surge      AZ      3.0        3.0         6       50
        Roger Wicker        Rep     pro-surge      MS      8.0        1.0         9       11
        Ron Paul            Rep     anti-surge     TX      3.0        4.0         7       57
        Roy Blunt           Rep     pro-surge      MO      1.0        2.0         3       67
        Russ Carnahan       Dem     anti-surge     MO      9.0        1.0         10      10
        Tom Cole            Rep     pro-surge      OK      3.0        20.0        23      87
        William Sali        Rep     pro-surge      ID      2.0        9.0         11      82
        Zach Wamp           Rep     pro-surge      TN      4.0        1.0         5       20

        Table 1b: Representatives who varied the 2nd vowel in Iraqi

      speaker              party   stance        state   /a:/.IRAQI   /æ/.IRAQI   Total   % /æ/.IRAQI
      Albio Sires          Dem     anti-surge    NJ      3            2           5       40
      Bill Pascrell Jr.    Dem     anti-surge    NJ      5            1           6       17
      Dan Boren            Dem     anti-surge    OK      1            4           5       80
      Dan Lungren          Rep     pro-surge     CA      1            1           2       50
      David Price          Dem     anti-surge    NC      2            1           3       33
      Earl Pomeroy         Dem     anti-surge    ND      1            2           3       67
      George Miller        Dem     anti-surge    CA      7            2           9       22
      John Dingell         Dem     anti-surge    MI      2            3           5       60
      Paul Hodes           Dem     anti-surge    NH      5            2           7       29
      Richard Hastings     Rep     pro-surge     WA      1            1           2       50
      Russ Carnahan        Dem     anti-surge    MO      1            1           2       50
      Solomon Ortiz        Dem     anti-surge    TX      4            2           6       33
      Tom Cole             Rep     pro-surge     OK      2            14          16      87.5

In Tables 1a and 1b, the speakers, whose identities are a matter of public record, are
listed alphabetically by first name, along with their political party affiliation (Democrat
or Republican), stance on the surge (anti-surge or pro-surge; note that Ron Paul is the
only speaker among those listed here who took a position on the surge divergent from the
majority position of his political party), as well as the state that they represent. The
columns ‘/a:/.IRAQ’ and ‘/æ/.IRAQ’ indicate the raw number of tokens of Iraq uttered
by that speaker that contained /a:/ or /æ/, respectively; ‘% /æ/.IRAQ’ indicates the
percentage of that speaker’s total number of occurrences of Iraq that had the vowel /æ/ –
this value was either 0% or 100% for the majority (86%) of the members of the House of
Representatives (see Hall-Lew et al., 2010 for more details).

The number of speakers represented in Table 1b (N=13) is lower than in 1a (N =
31), presumably because the adjectival or ethnonymic form, Iraqi, occurred much less
often than the nominal, Iraq, resulting in an unbalanced sample of tokens for each
speaker. Some speakers (N=9) style-shift within both parts of speech, and appear in both
tables; others style-shift either only within the nominal form (N=22) or only within the
adjectival/ethnonymic form (N=4), but not both (at least with respect this corpus, which
only analyzes a few minutes of speech per speaker). Perhaps surprisingly, only one
speaker (Ed Towns, NY Democrat) style-shifts only across part of speech category—in
other words, with respect to Iraq versus Iraqi—rather within one or the other. Towns
produces three tokens of Iraq with the /a:/ vowel and one token of Iraqi with the /æ/
vowel. Thus, the evidence does not suggest that speakers who vary are simply picking
one pronunciation for Iraq and another for Iraqi.
A few initial observations can be made about these speakers before conducting a
close analysis of some of their moments of style-shifting, in context. First, both
Democrats and Republicans exhibit intraspeaker variation of the second vowel in Iraq(i),
at a proportion that is comparable to the overall proportion of each party in the House of
Representatives. In other words, intraspeaker variation with respect to foreign (a) in
Iraq(i) is no more likely among members of one political party than another. Similarly,
regional variation appears comparable to the regional variation in the House more
generally; speakers who show intraspeaker variation come from Western, Northeastern,
Midwestern, and Southern states, alike. The fact that these speakers come from multiple
regions reduces the likelihood that perceptual coding error due to dialect issues
(specifically, difficulty in distinguishing /a:/ and /æ/ due to vowel shifts) is causing the
variation we see in these data.
Within those speakers who vary the second vowel of Iraq(i), some are more
variable than others. For example, as seen in Table 1a, Dan Boren (Dem, OK) and Tom
Cole (Rep, OK) use 91% and 87% /æ/, respectively, while Norm Dicks (Dem, WA) and
Jason Altmire (Dem, PA) use 6% and 8% /æ/, respectively. For these ends of the
continuum, variation is negligible, and these speakers pattern more like the majority of
speakers with 100% or 0% variable use. In contrast, Ron Paul (Rep, TX) uses 57% /æ/
(and 43% /a:/). Speakers like Paul, who are the most variable, present the ideal starting
point for an analysis of style-shifting with respect to foreign (a) in Iraq(i). Examining
these speakers provides moment-to-moment data of the active negotiating of this
variable’s social meaning through the speakers’ public construction of a political self.
Those aforementioned speakers who show somewhat weaker intraspeaker variation may,
we argue, be orienting to these meanings as well, but may be showing greater
intraspeaker consistency of style because of their clearer affiliations to more accessible,
mainstream affiliations within their political party.

4. ANALYSIS: VARIATION OVER THE TIME COURSE

Before analyzing how the pronunciation of the foreign (a) in Iraq(i) relates to discursive
context, there is an additional factor we must address: how speakers change their
pronunciation over the course of their speech. In other words, speakers who vary may be

consistently starting off with one variant, and then shifting to another variant as their
speech progresses. Given that the content of each speaker’s speech was not identical, if
we find common patterns over the time course between speakers, this indicates other
factors at play aside from the specific discursive context.
We might expect to see regular shifts over the course of these speeches for several
reasons. First, because members of Congress are giving these speeches on the House
floor, they are also audience members for the speeches of at least some of their peers. It is
therefore possible that speakers are initially accommodating to the speech of peers, and
then shifting toward their own more frequent pronunciation.
Another factor that may relate to time course variation is attention paid to speech;
speakers may be consciously attempting to adopt one pronunciation of Iraq(i), but revert
to another variant when they are no longer attending as closely to the issue of
pronunciation. While it is impossible to directly measure attention paid to speech in this
case, it is likely that many congresspeople will demonstrate similar patterns of attention
over the time course of speeches, due to the shared speech context, and shared methods
of speech preparation. We have reason to believe that speakers have cause to consciously
attend to their pronunciation of Iraq(i); the pronunciation of the foreign (a) vowel in
Iraq(i) was salient in the public discourse at the time of these speeches, with the common
consensus being that the ‘correct’ pronunciation was /a:/ (Nunberg 2002, 2004; Klein
2005; Raj 2006, etc.). It is possible that at least some congresspeople were being advised,
by aides or political allies, to alter their pronunciation of Iraq to this ‘correct’ version. It
is also possible some were being advised to use the /æ/ pronunciation, because of the
perception that it is the more nativized variant, and therefore sounds more ‘authentic’ or
‘patriotic’. Thus it is likely that some congresspeople are working with two Iraq(i)
variants in their repertoire: the variant they believe that they are supposed to be using,
and the variant they most frequently use.
To analyze the direction of style-shifting over the time course, we divided the
Iraq(i) tokens produced in each individual’s speech into four quarters, based on the order
in which they appeared. Each quarter was then assigned a percentage between 100% and
0%, with 100% indicating that all of the Iraq(i) tokens produced in that quarter used the
/a:/ variant, and 0% indicating that they all used the /æ/ variant. The percentage of /a:/
variants produced in each quarter for Democrats versus Republicans is given in Figure 1:

70%

60%

50%

40%
Rate of /a:/

30%
dem (n = 23)
rep (n = 13)
20%

10%

0%
1 2 3 4
Time Course of Speech by Quarter

Figure 1: Rate of /a:/ for Iraq(i) over course of speech, Democrats vs. Republicans

For the first quarter of Iraq(i) tokens, the Democrats and Republicans who use both
vowel forms are producing /a:/ at approximately the same rate (p = 0.3818). As the
speeches progress, however, Republicans significantly reduce their rate of /a:/ use, ending
up at only 24% in the final quarter (p = 0.0327, versus 48% in the first quarter).
Democrats (although trending upward) retain approximately the same rate of /a:/ use
throughout their speeches (p = 0.2032).
Because both groups of speakers begin at comparable rates of /a:/ use and then
diverge, we might argue that this provides evidence for accommodation, the notion that
speakers are being influenced by the speech of those who have preceded them. Looking
more closely at the numbers, however, this is unlikely; the overall rate of /a:/ use for
Iraq(i) across all 259 speakers is 29.63%, which is far closer to the ending rate of the
Republican variers in Figure 1. While we cannot be certain which speakers preceded the
variers in these data, the initial rates of approximately 50% for both parties far exceed the
overall level of /a:/ use in the House of Representatives. Unless these variers all happened
to be preceded by /a:/ users, accommodation to other speakers is inconsistent with these
data. The most likely account is that some other factor, not accommodation, is driving
rates of /a:/ use higher at the beginning of these speeches.
Attention paid to speech provides a more promising account for these trends. Two
scenarios present themselves: either Republicans are attempting to use the /a:/ variant,

and then forgetting to do so as their speech goes on, or they are attempting to use the /æ/
variant, and improving their success rate over time. Given that the final quarter, in which
Democrats and Republicans are using significantly different rates of /a:/, looks the most
like the overall data from all 259 speakers, it seems most likely that it is the first quarter
that is anomalous. If that is the case, then it is the first scenario, in which Republican
variers are attempting to use /a:/, that has resulted in this variation over the time course of
these speeches. This account is consistent with our informal observations of non-
congressional members of the Bush administration, who over the course of the Iraq War
increasingly used the /a:/ variant. It is also consistent with more general trends for foreign
(a); in the U.S., the /a:/ variant is on the rise, and is now the dominant variant for words
like Vietnam (Boberg 1997; 1999).
The factor of the time course does not fully account for the intraspeaker variation
observed here. Most obviously, it does not account for the patterns among the Democrat
variers, since as a group they were not found to vary significantly in one particular
direction over the course of their speeches. Analysis of discursive context can provide
further insight into how speakers use the foreign (a) variable.

5. ANALYSIS: MOMENT-TO-MOMENT STYLE-SHIFTING

In an effort to understand how foreign (a) may be a resource for style-shifting among
members of the U.S. House of Representatives, we focus in this section on the discursive
context that frames moments of style-shifting. Many of the instances of style-shifting can
be seen as strategic moves made by the speaker to present a particular political position
or political identity.
The frequency of switching and the direction of switching – from /a:/ to /æ/ or
from /æ/ to /a:/ – are both potentially revealing features for analyzing how style-shifting
emerges as a speech unfolds. The pronunciations of associated keywords that also contain
foreign (a), such as Iran, Saddam Hussein, and Baghdad, also provide a linguistic context
that shapes the interpretation of the variable in question. Furthermore, the pronunciations
that emerge in set, collocated phrases, such as The Iraq Study Group, must be considered
separately.
An additional factor of relevance here is one of phonetic detail. Not all tokens of
the second vowel in Iraq(i) are clearly produced as the front vowel, /æ/ or the back
vowel, /a:/ – some tokens are realized more as a low central vowel, something like /ɐ/ (cf.
Boberg, 2009). Such pronunciations occur across speakers of many regional varieties and
are not confined, at least in our data, to the speakers of a particular regional dialect
(Boberg (2009) suggests that this realization may be particularly common among
speakers with a low back vowel merger). It may be that this ‘in-between’ realization of
‘foreign (a)’ is motivated by the same objectives as style-shifting: the desire to construct
a stance that mediates between the two opposing meanings indexed by /æ/ and /a:/ –
Republican and Democrat. However, an acoustic analysis of vowel formant frequencies
is beyond the scope of the current analysis.

This is a pre-proof version of: Hall-Lew, Lauren, Rebecca L. Starr and Elizabeth Coppock. 2012. Style-
Shifting in the U.S. Congress: The vowels of “Iraq(i)”. In Juan Manuel Hernndez Campoy and Juan
Antonio Cutillas Espinosa, eds. Style-Shifting in Public: New Perspectives on Stylistic Variation.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 45-63.

        The transcript3 in (1) represents occurrences of Iraq(i) in Ron Paul’s (Republican,
TX) anti-surge speech. Pronunciations of keywords are given in IPA transcription, and
line breaks correspond roughly to intonational phrases. In order to focus on the relevant
moments of the speech, ellipses (…) accompanied with duration measures, e.g., {1:10},
indicate the passage of speech in which none of the keywords appeared, e.g., 1 minute, 10
seconds.

         (1) Iraq Troop Surge Debate: Ron Paul (Republican, TX) – Anti-Surge

         1       …{0:07}…
         2       I rise in support of the resolution and
         3       in opposition to the escalation uh in [ɪɹa:k]
                 …{0:22}…
         4       It could be that this is nothing more than a distraction
         5       from the dangerous military confrontation approaching with [ɪɹa:n]
                 …{0:05}…
         6       This resolution unfortunately does not address the disaster in [ɪɹæk]
         7       instead it appears to oppose the war
         8       while at the same time offering no chance
         9       no change of the status quo in [ɪɹa:k].
                 …{0:49}…
         10      [oʊsaməә] Bin Laden has expressed sadistic pleasure
         11      with our invasion of [ɪɹæk] and was surprised
         12      that we served his interests above and beyond his dreams
         13      on how we responded after 9/11 attacks.
                 …{0:17}…
         14      His recruitment of Islamic extremists has been greatly enhanced
         15      by our occupation of [ɪɹa:k].
                 …{0:54}…
         16      It’s important to recall that the Left,
         17      in 2003,
         18      ordered uh offered little
         19      opposition to the pre-emptive war in [ɪɹæk]
         20      and many are now not willing to stop it
         21      by defunding it
         22      or work to prevent an attack on [ɪɹa:n].
                 …{0:30}…
         23      Don’t forget
         24      the [ɪɹækis] and [səәdam] Hussein had nothing to do

3
    All data analyzed in this paper can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/user/armyofOne0001

25 with any terrorist attack against us
26 including that on 9/11.
…{0:47}…
27 The argument has been reduced to this:
28 if we leave now, [ɪɹæk] will be left in a mess.
29 Implying the implausible:
30 that if we stay, it won’t be a mess.
31 Since it could go badly when we leave,
32 that blame must be place on those who took us there,
33 not on those of us who now insist that Americans no longer
34 need be killed or maimed
35 and that Americans no longer
36 need to kill any more [ɪɹækis].
37 We’ve had enough of both.
…{1:24}…

Ron Paul exhibits style-shifting of ‘foreign (a)’ with remarkable frequency, shifting
between one variable to the other and back again between every single instance of the
pronunciation of Iraq, with the exception of the very last instance, in which he preserves
the /æ/ variant used in the instance before. His pronunciation of Iraqi, on the other hand,
is consistently produced with /æ/, while his pronunciation of Iran is consistently
produced with /a:/. Assimilation to the token of Iraqi in line 24, occurring between the
last two instances of Iraq, may in fact be one influence on the realization of /æ/ in the
utterance of Iraq in line 28.
This extreme style-shifting comes as no surprise with respect to the political
identity of Representative Ron Paul, its motivations being evident in this speech as well
as his speeches throughout his bids for the U.S. presidency in the 2008 and 2012
elections. Although currently a member of the Republican Party, Ron Paul takes many
political stances in opposition to the mainstream positions of the Republican Party, and
often in agreement with some segments of the Democratic Party. He is well known in the
United States for holding political views that are more in line with Libertarianism, and
ran as the Libertarian presidential candidate in 1988 (Rosenthal 1988). One of his views
that has long conflicted with the Republican Party line is his strong opposition to the war
in Iraq (Seelye & Wayne 2007), and more specifically, as evidenced by his speeches in
the corpus being analyzed here, his opposition to the 2007 troop surge.
In the speech shown in (1), Paul enacts a political stance with which he has
tremendous experience: a Republican who is opposing a majority-Republican position. A
public performance of such an in-between (or, arguably, altogether separate) position is
not an unexpected site for linguistic style-shifting. Hall-Lew, Coppock and Starr (2010)
showed that the second vowel in Iraq correlates significantly (in this same corpus) with
the political affiliations of the speaker; variation in this vowel can thus serve as a
resource for the construction of an atypical political persuasion. That Paul employs this
resource in such a regular, back-and-forth manner appears perhaps even intentional, or

strategic, and likely points to his decades of practice as public style-shifter.
The example in (2) gives a short excerpt of the second of two speeches given by
another Republican representative, Tom Cole, whose represents the much more typical
position of his party, in this case supporting the troop surge:

(2) Iraq Troop Surge Debate: Tom Cole (Republican, OK) – Pro-Surge

1 …{3:00}…
2 I'm pleased to have seen a constitution formed in [ɪɹæk]
3 that is the envy of the Arab world.
4 I'm proud to have seen three elections take place
5 all of which had increasingly high participation
6 and had frankly higher percentages than vote in our own elections.
7 I was hopeful when I saw a coalition government form
8 that had Kurds, that had Sunnis, that had Shia
9 that had other elements in the [ɪɹa:ki] population.
10 I've been impressed, uh, with [ɪɹa:ki] forces that do stand and fight.
11 And let's make no mistake about it:
12 most of the fighting and dying militarily is being done by [ɪɹa:kiz]
13 and they deserve our respect for that.
14 And frankly, I think like all Americans
15 I was enormously relieved when I see
16 actors like the late [æl za:rka:ri][note: al-Zarqawi]
17 people who would kill Americans anywhere, anytime
18 who are not from [ɪɹæk]
19 being sought out
20 with the help of [ɪɹækiz] and killed far away from our shores.
21 That's important, and that's something we should acknowledge.
22 I've also supported the war because I feared the consequences of defeat
23 in [ɪɹa:k].
24 And believe me there are consequences to losing the war
25 and these are real.
26 If we are not successful in [ɪɹa:k] we will have an emboldened enemy.
27 Not just the terrorists that we deal with
28 they're bad enough
29 but also the states that use terrorism as a tool of diplomacy.
30 You know
31 states like [ɪɹæn], states like Syria, will draw comfort.
32 We'll have demoralized friends in the region
33 and around the world
34 that will wonder whether or not they can really count on us once we make

a commitment.
35 We will see the death of an infant democracy
36 never a good thing for the lovers of freedom.
37 We will see a sectarian bloodbath in [ɪɹæk] that will result in the death of
tens of thousands
38 if not hundreds of thousands of [ɪɹækiz].
39 …{4.00}…

Cole’s pronunciation favors the Republican variant, /æ/, for both Iraq and Iraqi (and
Iran). He gives two speeches in the course of the debate; in his first speech, one of the
earliest speeches given during the three-day debate, Cole uses /æ/ exclusively. Across
both speeches he uses /æ/ for Iraq 20/23, or 87% of the time and /æ/ for Iraqi 14/16, or
87.5% of the time. The moments of switching to /a:/, which only occur in his second
speech, are thus of the most interest. The first instance, seen in line 9, is after Cole lists
the three main religious and ethnic factions in Iraq, and then uses /a:/ in referring to the
“Iraqi population.” In this context, Cole is highlighting the humanity of the people in
Iraq, and uses the variant that conveys his empathetic stance through its indexing of
respect for foreign cultures. This empathetic use can also be seen in (3), an excerpt
illustrating one switch in the speech of Earl Pomeroy, an anti-surge Democrat. In this
switch, Pomeroy clearly marks the difference between the country, /æ/, and the citizens
of that country, /a:/. (This difference cannot be entirely attributed to part of speech, since
he uses /æ/ for the other two instances of Iraqi.)

(3) Iraq Troop Surge Debate: Earl Pomeroy (Democrat, ND) – Anti-Surge

1 The United States alone cannot create a democracy in [ɪɹæk]
2 only the [ɪɹa:ki] people can achieve that.

Returning to Representative Cole’s speech in (2), after switching to /a:/ in line 9, the
switch back to /æ/ for both the nominal (line 18) and the ethnonym (line 20) occurs after
the mention of the violent militant al-Zarqawi and other perpetrators of anti-American
violence. The use of the more nativized /æ/ variant in this context indexes a more
patriotic stance.
Another suggestive aspect of Cole’s shifts is that he uses the /a:/ variant for Iraq
in contexts where he talks about defeat and failure, as in lines 23 and 26. It is possible
that Cole associates phrases like “defeat in Iraq” with Democrats, or perhaps wishes his
listeners to make that association. Overall, the fact that he only style-shifts in his second
speech, after listening to the debates for a couple of days, may suggest that the social
meaning of the foreign (a) variable became increasingly salient to Cole and other
members of the House as the debate wore on.
The segments in (4) and (5) show brief moments of shifts for two other
Representatives. These illustrate how rapidly switching can occur, and that it is not
always possible to pinpoint a stance-based explanation for style-shifting in the second

vowel of Iraq. Example (4) contains a near minimal pair, with Iraq appearing as the
object of withdraw from and leave, which are arguably synonymous. Moreover, the
sentences in which they appear express the same idea with identical sentence structure.
Example (5) provides another near minimal pair, with the phrase failure in Iraq appearing
twice, once with each vowel realization.

(4) Iraq Troop Surge Debate: John Shadegg (Republican, AZ) – Pro-Surge

1 Name for me a single jihadi or Islamist leader
2 who has said, if we withdraw from [ɪɹæk]
3 if we pull our troops back, they will stop.
4 Name me one who has said
5 that if we leave [ɪɹa:k]
6 they will walk away
7 and not carry their fight to the rest of the world and to the streets.

(5) Iraq Troop Surge Debate: Elton Gallegy (Republican, CA) – Pro-Surge

1 The consequences for failure in [ɪɹæk] are not just failure in [ɪɹa:k]
2 [ɪɹa:k]'s stability has direct repercussions on [iɹa:n], Saudi Arabia, Israel,
and all of the Middle East.

These seemingly random shifts may result from varying attention paid to speech,
as discussed in the Section 4 analysis of variation over the time course. Alternatively, this
type of style-shifting might be motivated simply by politicians’ desire to have variety in
their speech, allowing them to appeal to a wider audience. In other words, it is sometimes
the use of variability and shifting itself that serves politicians’ rhetorical goals, rather than
the particular meanings of the individual pronunciations. An interesting further prediction
of this hypothesis, which could be tested in future work, is that politicians should be more
variable in their pronunciation of Iraq than non-politicians, who are not necessarily as
motivated to appeal to a wide audience.

6. DISCUSSION: PRESENTING A PUBLIC POLITICAL STYLE

If we can conceive of the U.S. House of Representatives as a speech community, one
aspect of such a community that makes it particularly interesting is the conflicting pull of
congressional versus regional identity on its members. By congressional identity, we
refer to the shared linguistic and social practices of House members; congresspeople, for
example, know how to structure a speech on the House floor, and are familiar with
technical terms for government bodies and practices. Members must participate in these
conventions, to a certain extent, in order to be taken seriously as elected officials and to
accomplish their political goals. A member who is too closely identified with this

congressional identity, however, runs the risk of being labeled a ‘Washington insider’. In
the American political imaginary, congresspeople are characterized as political outsiders
who emerge from geographic regions and promote their own regional interests to the
exclusion of national concerns. House members must defend their regional credentials in
biannual elections, and are therefore under particular pressure to demonstrate local
affiliation and, in many cases, Washington outsider status. Thus, while House members
must present themselves as competent officials who understand how government works,
they also commonly attempt to affiliate themselves with the average, non-privileged local
citizen. Perhaps in part as a result of this pressure, many congresspeople, in spite of their
elite status, maintain noticeably marked regional accents. As a result, although the
members of the House of Representatives share a common stylistic repertoire, they also
maintain individual styles that reflect local identities. We must evaluate the variation of
the second Iraq(i) vowel in light of this duality.
This pressure to avoid being perceived as an elitist insider is reflected in the
overall Iraq(i) data, in which congresspeople, regardless of party, used /æ/ more
frequently than /a:/. The popularity of /æ/ among House members contrasts, for example,
with the speech of news anchors of the same time period, speakers who are heavily
invested in ‘correct’ speech (Starr, Coppock & Hall-Lew, in preparation). Although /a:/ is
significantly preferred by Democrats relative to Republicans’ rate of use, both parties use
/æ/ more frequently than /a:/, potentially seeking to avoid /a:/’s elitist associations. One
way in which we might account for the correlation between the realization of foreign (a)
and political affiliation, then, is the notion that Republicans simply feel more pressure to
demonstrate local identity and reject ‘correct’ pronunciations as an active construction of
patriotism. But if this were the case, we would expect the use of regional accent features
to correlate with the use of the /æ/ variant in Iraq(i) – this prediction is not borne out in
these data. The foreign (a) variable in Iraq(i) appears to index more than congressional
versus regional identities, and its role in the performance of political stance is not merely
mediated through those identities.
Given the absence of correlations between regional accent and the pronunciation
of Iraq(i), it is possible that the foreign (a) variable can serve as an index of political
identity more readily in part because of its lack of regional associations. As mentioned
above, members of congress must maintain a regional identity that is distinct from that of
their political allies in congress. At the same time, as in any speech community, members
use language to signal affiliation and difference. Political allies must find linguistic
resources with which they can demonstrate their affiliations, which do not interfere with
their performance of local identity. These features can be lexical (e.g., death tax vs. estate
tax), morphological (Democrat Party vs. Democratic Party), or, in this case,
phonological. Thus, politically-charged language can serve not only to frame debates (cf.
Lakoff 2004), but also to reflect and promote political cohesion.
While pronunciation of Iraq(i) serves as an effective index of political identity for
House members for the reasons outlined above, the extent to which the speech of
ordinary citizens reflects their political identities remains an open question. We predict
that, because pronunciation of foreign (a) serves not only as an index of political identity,
but also as an index of various attitudes that correlate with political affiliation, such as

one’s view of foreign cultures, pronunciation of this variable should correlate to some
degree with the political affiliations of non-politicians, even in speech contexts that are
not overtly political. Silva et al. (2011), a study of pronunciation of Iraq and Iran by
residents of the conservative Texas city of Arlington, found that self-described
conservatives were less likely to use the /aj/ variant for the first vowel and /æ/ for the
second vowel in Iraq if they could speak a foreign language, while the pronunciation of
those who felt they were relatively liberal was unaffected by foreign language
background. Further studies of this kind in more politically diverse settings may reveal
broader effects of political affiliation in everyday speech.

7. CONCLUSION

The speeches given by the members of the U.S. House of Representatives on the House
floor constitute a highly constrained stylistic context – public, scripted, nationally
televised, and strictly persuasive and argumentative. Within this very specific genre we
can still find speakers making strategic linguistic shifts at the phonetic level to construct
situationally relevant identities. In the present analysis we have shown how pronunciation
of the second vowel of one highly salient foreign loanword, Iraq(i), functions as a useful
linguistic resource for a speaker’s moment-to-moment changes in stance and footing.
These shifts gain social indexicality through their iterative use by certain actors, with
certain political and other identities, beyond the situational moment, and furthermore
beyond the House of Representatives, in the use of Iraq(i) among speakers of U.S.
English more generally. Key to this analysis is recognizing that the binary opposition of
Democrat and Republican is socially constructed: negotiated and ever changing. Like all
such constructed binaries, there exists a multidimensional gray area that politicians
negotiate in their attempts to represent their constituencies, their political parties, and
their own political convictions.

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