Dissertation Defense: Arianna Janoff
Candidate Name: Arianna Janoff
Major: Linguistics
Advisor: Heidi Hamilton, Ph.D.
Title: Uncovering Implicit Social Hierarchies in Political Discourse: A Cross-disciplinary Analysis of the
2019 United States Democratic Party Presidential Primary Debates
This study brings together interactional sociolinguistics and critical discourse in the examination of ideologies that position one person, or one group, above another in political discourse. I analyze social hierarchies in the eight 2019 Democratic Party primary debates leading up to the 2020 United States Presidential election in three textual forms: the televised debates, published debate transcripts, and post-debate online news articles. Each dataset reveals a distinct group constructed as dominant over another: American citizens over Latino immigrants, English language over Spanish language, and winning candidates over losing ones. I draw on Bucholtz & Hall’s (2005) relationality principle, Bakhtin’s (1981) chronotopes, entextualization, recontextualization (Bauman & Briggs, 1990), resemiotization (Iedema, 2003), and positioning (Bamberg, 1997, 2011; Davies & Harré, 1990).
I first show how candidates and moderators use references to time and space to construct a dual discourse of immigration, adequating themselves with the master narrative of America as a melting pot of peoples and distancing themselves from present-day, Latin American immigrants. I then examine transcripts of the debates published by The Washington Post, arguing that while the debates themselves contained many instances of translanguaging (García, 2009), the creation of the official record re-established boundaries between named languages. These transcription choices illuminate the linguistic ideologies of The Washington Post, reinforcing the subordinate social position of Spanish in White American Public Space, minoritizing and ostracizing Spanish speakers, and upholding English as the only language welcome in the United States. Finally, I investigate the positioning of candidates as winners and losers in recontextualizations of debate speech. Journalists across five publications introduce winning candidates with negative evaluation and interaction description communicative verbs (Battaner et al., 2001; Calsamiglia & Ferrero, 2003) that evoke aggressive fighting imagery, whereas losing candidates have their speech introduced with discourse action description verbs. This study demonstrates the importance of examining constructions of “us” and “them”, illuminating three of the numerous ways that preconceived ideologies about groups of people influence linguistic and discursive practices in political discourse.