Political talk as performance
Political discourse is highly staged and closely scrutinized. Politicians use pronouns, phonetic variants, gesture, and other semiotic resources to project authority, align with party identities, distinguish themselves from opponents, and negotiate competition within their own parties.
Treating politicians’ talk as a heightened form of performance, this research examines how linguistic variation acquires indexical value—and how those values are recalibrated across electoral margins, institutional roles, media circulation, and embodied presentation.