Abstract
This paper contributes to previous research on how politicians use sociolinguistic variables to index their party affiliation, enact stances, and construct political identities. It does so by investigating the 2015 U.S. House of Representatives’ debate on repealing the estate tax, with a focus on the indexical meanings of the “American tax variable”, which consists of the lexical variants estate tax and death tax. In the televised debate, 23 speakers use 31 estate tax tokens and 46 death tax tokens. As the results indicate, the estate tax variant indexes an affiliation with the Democrats and a pro-tax stance, whereas the death tax variant is linked with the Republicans and an anti-tax stance. Apart from expressing these conventionalised indexical meanings, House members also style-shift between the variants and employ them to convey interactional stances of (dis)alignment and empathy, construct a political identity of in-betweenness, and promote a conservative version of Americanism.
Highlights
On April 16, 2015, the U.S House of Representatives voted to repeal the estate tax, a federal inheritance tax imposed on the transfer of the estate of a decedent (Fisher 2009:429)
This paper adds to previous research on how sociolinguistic variables are used in political discourse by demonstrating that House members deploy the American tax variable for various political purposes: they employ it to index their tax stance, create inter-partyalignments, enact situationally relevant stances, and express and construct political identities
The death tax variant is associated with Republican House members and an anti-tax stance, whereas the estate tax variant is linked with Democratic representatives and a pro-tax position
Summary
On April 16, 2015, the U.S House of Representatives voted to repeal the estate tax, a federal inheritance tax imposed on the transfer of the estate of a decedent (Fisher 2009:429). I follow “Third Wave” (Eckert 2012:93) sociolinguistic studies on stancetaking by discursively analysing how Republicans and Democrats shift between the variants in order to create interpersonal (dis)alignments and position themselves with respect to the object of their talk and political identities (Jaffe 2009:4–10). In this qualitative analysis of stancetaking, I look at co-occurring linguistic features that contribute to the indexical meaning of the tax variable (Kiesling 2009:177–179). How this quantitative and qualitative analysis of the American tax variable is linked to previous studies is addressed
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