The Risks of Researching Syntactic Phenomena in Edited Parliamentary Transcripts

Introduction

Althingi, the Parliament of Iceland, publishes its speeches on the web in video and in edited written transcripts and has over time built a huge open database, with the total speech time in recent legislative sessions being around 600 hours per year.

One might think that this would be an excellent resource for linguistic research, but I’d argue that this database best serves a limited scope of research, namely into formal standard Icelandic and how it manifests itself in the edited text versions of parliamentary speeches, and thus research into editorial policy rather than MPs’ language. I will demonstrate this with one recent example of a syntactic study on parliamentary speeches based on Icelandic plenary session transcripts.

A study on syntactic fronting

The study in question was a study not of the manifestation of the written standard in editorial policy but of syntactic development in a person’s speech over their lifetime, on stylistic fronting (Icel. “stílfærsla”) in the language of former MP, Minister and Speaker of Althingi, Steingrímur J. Sigfússon. Linguists Lilja Björk Stefánsdóttir and Anton Karl Ingason conducted the research and published it in the linguistics journal Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði (2022, 151–178).

Stylistic fronting is a shift of a syntactic constituent in sentences with a subject gap—i.e. a sentence with no visible subject, such as these, cited in Stefánsdóttir and Ingason’s article (Ibid. 152):

1a. Allar ákvarðanir sem _____ voru teknar eru réttlætanlegar.

     All     decisions     that             were made    are      justifiable.

1b. Allar ákvarðanir sem teknar voru _____ eru réttlætanlegar.

     All     decisions     that    made    were               are     justifiable.

Here in example b an optional shift is made: a past participle is shifted to the subject position of a relative clause. The shift is a marker that indicates a more formal tone of language but not a matter of perceived right or wrong language.

The study concluded that, in Sigfússon’s speech, this shift had a high presence in his early years in parliament before then receding, until Sigfússon became a government Minister and it increased again. The theory is that he tried to speak more formally to prove himself as a young MP, and then later was again more formal in his language as a Minister, as part of taking that role seriously.

In the chapter about research methods, the authors mention that they watched “quite many” (Ibid. 163) video recordings of Sigfússon delivering speeches in parliament. However, the research is based on a text file of his speeches.

Methodological challenges in the analysis of parliamentary transcripts

There are at least two methodological problems with the study presented above.

Firstly, it is possible that, as a Minister, Sigfússon’s speeches were written by someone else. Stefánsdóttir and Ingason address this and say that in the recordings that they watched he was very rarely reading from a piece of paper (Ibid. 163). My sources within parliament agree that generally as a Minister Sigfússon spoke extemporaneously and was not reading, but may have had notes or the outlines of a speech to consult while speaking. The authors however do not say that they watched all the speeches covered by their research and, if recent experience is anything to go by, it is at least possible that his speeches were in some cases written by someone else. While this isn’t evidence against the premise of the research, it casts doubt on it that should be considered.

Secondly, and this is the significant factor, once a speech had been delivered it was, for the time the research covers, typed up by a stenographer and then edited by two language editors. The problem here for linguistic research in general is that stenographers (replaced at Althingi by AI in 2019) would not always type word for word but rather make certain edits on the fly when needed to fit the formal written standard of Icelandic, for example leaving out repetitions and hesitation markers. Generally, they would take some of the first steps in what the two editors would primarily be doing afterwards, moving the language from a spontaneous and somewhat informal spoken register to a more formal written one.

More importantly, whether stenographers typed Sigfússon’s speeches word for word or not, we do know that stylistic fronting has traditionally been favoured in editorial policy at Althingi, and was indeed so for the time covered by the research, as part of changing spoken language into written, making it more formal and affecting the very thing that the research covers. Other syntactic edits to make the language more formal for the written transcript include favouring a V2-order, which means keeping the verb of a sentence in second place even if it was perhaps in third place when spoken by an MP. Let’s look at a hypothetical example, where 2a is normal in speech but 2b feels more natural when reading written text:

2a. Við náttúrlega komum þangað fyrst.

        We of-course came     there     first.

2b. Við komum náttúrlega þangað fyrst.

       We  came    of-course   there     first.

Up until 2022, there were two editors in chief for speeches at Althingi, who would read entire debates on paper and make corrections and stylistic improvements. After they marked their edits on the page margin, another editor would make those edits in the computer. One very common edit on those page margins was to introduce stylistic fronting into sentences where the MP hadn’t used it in their speech. This means that in the database used in the research, we could have countless examples of stylistic fronting that didn’t come from Sigfússon himself but rather from editors.

Conclusion

It would seem anecdotally likely that the conclusion of the research is correct: that as a Minister and as a junior MP trying to prove himself, Sigfússon would use more formal language and utilize, among other things, stylistic fronting to achieve that goal, and, whether or not the stylistic fronting came from Sigfússon himself or an editor afterwards, the correlation between that syntactic phenomenon and formal standard Icelandic is clear. However, the methodology seems flawed because Althingi’s published text versions of speeches that were used as data are edited texts and therefore not a reliable source for syntactic research, except perhaps for a study into how formal standard Icelandic manifests itself in Althingi’s editorial policy.

If nothing else, this article should be taken as a general reminder that the text versions of speeches made in plenary sessions at Althingi are edited, first and foremost for ease of reading, as is done in most if not all parliaments. Of course, the meaning stays the same, but what is easily understood when spoken out loud may not be as obvious when read as text. The published speeches are therefore not always transcripts in the strictest sense but perhaps rather reports, and hence not necessarily an accurate reflection of the linguistic phenomena in an MP’s speech.

Kristján F. Sigurðsson is an editor for speeches and documents in the publishing department of Althingi, the Parliament of Iceland.

Reference

Stefánsdóttir, L. B. & A. K. Ingason (2022). Einstaklingsbundin lífstíðarbreyting. Þróun stílfærslu í þingræðum Steingríms J. Sigfússonar. –Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði (44), 151–178.