"Look at all those nouns in a row!" a Russian woman said to me in 1990, gesturing angrily at an inscription on the wall of the Lenin Museum in Leningrad. "Who writes like that! Who can read it!" Political scientists reasonably suppose that people living under authoritarian rule dislike either the content of ideologies that justify domination or the conduct of rulers who practice it. Yet neither content nor conduct drew this woman's ire, but "nouns in a row."
The woman was objecting to what linguists call the iconicity of communist Russian. "Iconicity" refers to linguistic form that copies a conceptual feature of the meaning to be communicated by an utterance (Radwanska-Williams 1994, 27). An illustrative example is the pair of Russian sentences (1) and (2) (taken from Yokoyama 1995). Although both sentences have the same literal translation--"By her are children"--their meanings differ.
(1) U nee deti.
(2) U nee est' deti.
When both sentences are pronounced with the ordinary declarative intonation, their meanings differ only because the copula (Russian est', English 'to be') is either omitted or inserted. Conforming to the ordinary Russian practice of omitting the copula, sentence (1) does not separate "her" from "children"; it means "she has children." Inserting the copula, sentence (2) does separate "her" from "children"; one meaning is "she has children with her." Because Russian allows the possibility of avoiding formal separation between "her" and "children," addition of one separator puts conceptual distance between the woman and the children; because English requires formal separation of "she" from "children" by "has," addition of a second separator ("with") puts the conceptual distance. Both languages express conceptual distance by elongating the utterance.
The tendency for longer utterances to communicate more conceptual distance turns out to be widespread across many languages and perhaps universal (Haiman 102-155). The study of iconicity of distance in political speech accordingly offers an opportunity to test a hypothesis formulated by Lasswell (1949, 29-31) about one difference between authoritarianism and democracy:
Since nondemocratic elites demand superiority, they interpose barriers of 'distance' and 'height' between themselves and the rank and file.... As communities move toward the democratic end of the scale... [l]eaders reach out for the common speech.....
Evidence about the iconicity of political Russian can answer two interwoven questions, one concerning the authenticity of Russian democracy and one concerning the contribution in general of language to democratic institutions. First, of course, the authenticity of Russian democracy has been doubted. Urban (1994) argues that the surfeit of mutual recrimination in post-Soviet political Russian obstructs the mutual accommodation among contending political parties putatively essential to democratic consolidation. Other observers allege that socioeconomic deterioration is turning Russian public opinion against democracy (e.g., Hough 1994, Whitefield and Evans 1994). An observation that political Russian is moving closer to the common speech, or "vernacular," on the other hand, favors arguments that Russian developments parallel transitions toward democracy observed in other polities (Roeder 1989, Bova 1992, Fish 1995). By this interpretation, the iconicity of political Russian provides an index of movement from dictatorship toward democracy.
Second, and more generally, a study of changing iconicity in political Russian offers both a new concept and new techniques for investigating the interaction between democratic or authoritarian institutions and political figures' verbal self-presentations. Many political scientists think the causal arrow runs from institutions to speech. Authoritarian institutions supply incentives for rulers to isolate themselves from popular influence (Roeder 1993). Conversely, transitions to electoral institutions supply incentives for politicians to address themselves to voters (Cox 1987), in the hope of building identification with potential voters that will overcome the voters' rational aversion to such forms of democratic participation as voting, working in campaigns, or contributing money. Institutional incentives might be considered sufficient to explain the many cases in which authoritarian rulers confine their public utterances to a speech sharply distinguished from, and claiming superiority to, the vernacular or vernaculars spoken by populations under their rule, while transitions to democracy have often begun when someone (a liberalizer within the regime or a popular leader) publicly transgresses the restrictions dividing official speech from the vernacular, and electoral politicians move their speech closer to popular language. By this interpretation, iconicity serves as a cue by which the populace judges the responsiveness of political elites.
Although institutional incentives can, in principle, explain the transformation from the official speech of rulers to the intermediary speech of transition leaders to the ordinary speech of politicians, the causal arrow may also run the opposite direction. Political speech may affect what institutions prevail in a society, or (I suspect) institutions and political speech may prove to be mutually constitutive. Authoritarian rule, characterized by adoption of policies unwelcome to the public, is more stable when the populace refrains from participation--which I use in Verba and Nie's (1972) limited sense of joining in the selection of officials and policies, not in some Soviet specialists' former sense of joining in the implementation of policy decided from above (Bahry and Silver 1990, 826-828) nor in Barber's (1984, 132) sense of "strong democracy" in which engaged citizens choose policies directly through "self-legislation." Conversely, leaders engineering a transition from authoritarianism must invite participation for the sake of achieving change, but they also need to limit participation for the sake of keeping change within boundaries beyond which conservative rivals might stage a repressive coup. Politicians trying to sustain electoral democracy need to encourage popular participation in order to maintain popular faith in the fairness of election victories. I assume that what people hear or read affects what they think, and that their choices whether to participate depend on whether they think that politics is beyond their grasp or within their reach. If an iconicity that represents politics as distant from the populace can make people think (even at the margin) that politics lies beyond their grasp, icons of distance can help sustain authoritarianism; conversely, icons of closeness can foster democracy. By this interpretation, iconicity presents either a barrier or an avenue to democratic participation.
The interpretation that a rapprochement of political speech with the vernacular lowers barriers to participation resolves the paradox offered by Russian democratization for theories that attribute democracy to popular attitudes conditioned by socioeconomic advance (Almond and Verba 1963, Lipset 1981, Huntington 1991, Janos 1992). Contrary to these theories, as socioeconomic conditions in Russia have deteriorated, over the last decade democracy in Russia has made steady progress. Of course, these theorists would not expect democracy in Russia to survive economic decay that alienates Russians from democracy (Laitin 1995, 168). At the same time, these theories also predict that democracy should never have appeared in Russia. If popular attitudes conducive to democracy can arise not only through contemplation of favorable socioeconomic conditions but also through consideration of speech acts that transcend the alienation of ruled from rulers characteristic of authoritarian polities (Passin 1963, 90), then observation of change in the iconicity of political Russian makes Russian democracy more understandable, as well as, by extension, suggesting how democracy can arise elsewhere under equally unfavorable socioeconomic circumstances.
If iconicity can exert an effect independent of institutional transformation, during at least some democratic transitions iconicity should begin to change in the speech even of leaders who, never seeking election to office, lack any institutional incentive to seek identification with the general public. Transitions to democracy may begin either when leaders outside the regime mobilize the people to overthrow the authoritarian regime (violently or peacefully) or when a leader within the authoritarian regime begins to appeal for support from people formerly excluded from politics (Przeworski 1991, 54-95). In the latter case, whatever institutional incentives may be present for the leader to preserve isolation from the population fail to dictate the leader's behavior, and the leader begins to reduce distance.
I begin with a theoretical discussion using comparative cases to show what authoritarian rulers gain when their language distances them from the population under their control. Then I discuss the procedure for measuring whether conceptual distance from the vernacular has declined from authoritarian to transitional to electoral Russian. In the last section I present the evidence of decreasing conceptual distance.
Authoritarian rulers characteristically dissociate the language of politics from the vernacular or vernaculars spoken by populations under their control (Scott 1990, Anderson 1991). Rulers either use a language foreign to the local population or develop a distinctive "register" of the local vernacular. A register may be defined as "a coherent complex of linguistic features linked to a situation of use" (Irvine 1990, 127). Rulers who conduct politics in a foreign language and rulers who conduct politics in a distinctive register have something in common: in both cases the popular audience can be expected to experience their speech as an icon of distance. For authoritarian rulers, distancing speech serves to identify politics as a activity separate from the population's daily affairs and to communicate the population's political incompetence. If distancing speech promotes authoritarianism, then transitions to democracy should begin with transgression of the rules separating authoritarian speech from the vernacular, while electoral politics should proceed in the vernacular.
Rulers who rely on foreign languages practice either linguistic colonialism or modification of the local vernacular by inclusion of foreign elements. A few examples of linguistic colonialism include the use of European languages by colonial rulers in Asia, Africa and America (Anderson 1991) and the use of former colonial languages by independent rulers in post-colonial sub-Saharan Africa (Laitin 1992, J. O'Barr 1976, 78). Languages of state produced by incorporating foreign elements into local vernaculars include Ottoman bureaucrats' adoption of Persian and Arabic vocabulary, used according to its syntax of origin, to differentiate their Turkish from that of their subjects (Lewis 1968, 426-435) and the borrowing of Greek and Latin grammar to distinguish parliamentary from ordinary English before the nineteenth-century extension of the franchise (Smith 1986).
Registers of politics may be either elevated or depressed relative to the vernacular. Noble Javanese addressed each other in an elevated register called krama, distinguished from the vernacular ngoko by longer words and "permissive of frequent and lengthy pauses when speaking" (Errington 1985, 9-10). Greek authoritarians formally required all official statements to be made in Katharevousa, a high register distinguished from ordinary Dhimotiki by greater abstractness and more complex syntax and also used in church and in some scientific publications (Frangoudaki 1992). Nazi German and the speech of Wolof nobles represent depressed registers marked by deliberate brutalization or incoherence. Emulating Hitler's Mein Kampf, Nazi speakers deliberately transgressed the boundary, relatively prominent in German, between oral and written speech. They mixed slang considered crude by German audiences with elaborate metaphors drawn from technology, war and church sermons (Maser 1981, Bork 1970), producing overlong sentences by "heaping" words and phrases for the sake of emphatic repetition (Seidel and Seidel-Slotty 1961, 1-8). Wolof nobles speak softly, intentionally stammer, and make deliberate grammatical errors in a show of "conspicuous disfluency" rationalized as a device to avoid overwhelming subordinate castes with the weight of their authority (Irvine 1990).
Distinctive registers and foreign languages are alike in producing linguistic forms that signify conceptual distance by replicating physical distance. A Wolof noble's murmuring mumble sounds as distinct as speech in a normal tone heard from afar. The indistinctness of distant speech also characterizes what Greek audiences heard in the speeches of their authoritarian rulers, who used Katharevousa "to conceal the absence of information among incomprehensible ancient words" (Frangoudaki 1992, 369). The tendency for Hitler's speech to rouse strong emotions but leave little trace in memory is a commonplace. He achieved this effect by exploiting the two-octave range of his voice. The contrast of the high audible frequency of stressed words to the low frequency of unstressed words disrupted reconstruction of Hitler's meaning by causing his speeches to seem to doppler in and out, as if he were shouting from a distance (Maser 1981, 58). The prolonged sentences produced by speakers of Javanese krama, by Nazi and Greek authoritarian orators, and by Wolof kings who needed to repeatedly pause to correct their deliberate grammatical errors, also produce a feeling of physical distance relative to normal speech. For in ordinary speech, each clause combines the number of words which transient attention is capable of remembering while the mind analyzes their meaning (Chafe 1994, 65-69). When clauses are protracted, the hearer or reader must pay more attention in order to remember and understand, just as when sounds are attenuated by distance. The difficulties in remembering and comprehending iconically distant speech in a known language turn into near impossibilities when person hears or reads text in an unknown foreign language. Utterances or passages of written texts are literally meaningless to the hearer or reader. They become strings of sounds or shapes which the person cannot reproduce. In this limited respect, text in foreign languages produces an experience comparable to the feeling of elongation aroused by protracted clauses--"gobbledygook"--in an audience's native language.
When audiences for authoritarian speech hear or read text that distances the speaker or writer from the audience, they recognize that the speaker or writer could have used the vernacular but chose to stand aloof. The implicit rejection of the vernacular denigrates it as a medium of political communication. Disqualification of the vernacular for politics in turn communicates to popular audiences the speaker or writer's assumption that people who formulate their thoughts in the vernacular are politically incompetent. Of course authoritarian speakers and writers, especially those relying on a distinctive register vaguely comprehensible to popular audiences, make this inference explicit. The Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, for example, charged that urban Germans had "sunk to such a low level that they can no longer form opinions on political questions" (Petzold 1983, 97). If messages that people are politically incompetent and that politics is distant from their concerns are more likely to depress participation than messages ascribing competence to the people and nearness to politics, then distancing speech serves to perpetuate authoritarianism.
Where official speech separates politics from the people and signifies that the rulers ascribe political incompetence to the people, inclusion of the people into selection of officials and policies requires some political contestant to transgress the rules confining discussion of politics to the official speech, initiating a rapprochement with the local vernacular. Adoption of the vernacular by political contestants contradicts earlier messages that bearers of the vernacular are incompetent to deliberate political issues. and affirms that politics has stopped being separate from activities that ordinary people do. Thus transitions to democracy often begin with speech acts, either by authoritarian officials or by members of the excluded population, that question the usefulness of official speech for discussing politics, that assert the competence of the vernacular, that call for language reform in favor of the vernacular, or that urge the cleansing of the language by erasure of elements thought typical of official speech (Widmer 1966, Lewis 1968, 426-434, Andics 1975, Bailey 1976, Errington 1985, Smith 1986, Tulis 1987, Jahr 1989, 33-35, Cmiel 1990, Wierzbicka 1990, Ennaji 1991, 12-13, Frangoudaki 1992, Baker 1992, Zaret 1992). The transitions to democracy begun by transgression of the rules controlling official speech may, of course, either succeed or fail.
Transgressive speech acts trigger a rapprochement of the official speech with the vernacular. However, during a transition to democracy in which the previous authoritarian rulers remain in place, both proponents and opponents of democratization face a complex tradeoff that limits the rapprochement of their speech to the vernacular. Authoritarian officials retaining powerful positions would prefer to see transition leaders preserve the iconicity that sets officials above the people. While a desire to identify with the people motivates proponents of democratization to bring their speech as close as possible to the vernacular, concern about resistance from authoritarian officials motivates proponents to continue observing some restraints on their speech. Conversely, opponents of democratization prefer the iconicity that the authoritarian officialdom wants, but the opponents also fear that the proponents may monopolize popular support. Consequently opponents emulate the linguistic behavior of proponents, not so much in content but in positioning themselves as linguistic intermediaries between the authoritarian officialdom and the people.
While the authoritarian rulers establish conceptual distance from the people and transition leaders position themselves as linguistic intermediaries, electoral politicians gain by minimizing perceived separation from voters. In contrast to authoritarian rulers who want their subjects to be passive and transition leaders who fear that popular participation may get out of hand, electoral politicians want citizens to vote, to work in campaigns, to contribute, and to contact. All these forms of participation become more likely when citizens feel they can project their own identities onto a political candidate (Sears 1993, Bobo and Gilliam 1990, Franklin 1991, Granberg 1993, 99-102, Rosenstone and Hansen 1993, 19). Accordingly, in contrast to separateness of authoritarian language from ordinary speech, observers of political speech in democracy tend to note its banality (Edelman 1988, 111). In electoral polities, "the politically most efficacious language... will be quite ordinary language" (Geis 1987, viii; cf. Cmiel 1990; Tulis 1986; Cotteret et al. 1976, 50-51).
In a few democratic states, such as Switzerland and Luxembourg, politics proceeds in one language while citizens conduct daily life in another vernacular. These democracies differ from authoritarianism, however, in two ways: universally educating the citizenry for competence in the political language and attaching no superiority to it. On the contrary, the local dialect is valued for reinforcing consciousness of national distinctiveness that would otherwise be challenged by the presence of a larger neighbor (Germany or France) whose culture has shaped the language used for politics.
In sum, iconic distance relative to local vernaculars should be greatest in the speech of authoritarian rulers, intermediate in the speech of transition leaders, and least in the speech of electoral politicians. Changes in conceptual distance serve to alter the population's feelings of alienation from or identification with politics. It might, of course, be argued that such indicators as the length of utterances and the indistinctness of expression represent something other than manipulation of popular alienation or identification. Long, flowery sentences without much content are characteristic of what rhetoricians call "demonstrative" speech, while a plainer style intended for reasoned persuasion characterizes the alternative of "deliberative" speech (for definitions, see Leeman 1963, 23, 26-27, Campbell and Jamieson 1990, 14-33). Demonstrative oratory is sometimes interpreted as legitimating the institutions that enable authoritarians to rule, while deliberative oratory occurs when politicians seek personal legitimacy as candidates. From this perspective, both speech that is iconically distancing and ordinary speech serve the same purpose of legimating rule: the difference lies in whether institutions or persons are legitimated.
The question, however, is whether demonstrative rhetoric legitimates or delegitimates authoritarian institutions in the eyes of the population. Scott (1990) argues that authoritarian rulers supply dominated populations such strong incentives to conceal their feelings of alienation, in order to avoid punishment for expressing dissatisfaction, that the apparent legitimacy of authoritarian institutions is always illusory. If demonstrative rhetoric does not legitimate authoritarian rule in the eyes of the subject population, then one must look elsewhere for reasons why authoritarian rulers take the trouble to communicate, even with demonstrative rhetoric, to people who do not participate in choosing their rulers. One possibility is Scott's (1990, 45) suggestion that dominant elites structure their public statements to discourage "the possibility of autonomous social action by subordinates."
Icons of conceptual distance in political speech take at least three forms: variation in the length of clauses, variation in the expression of difference, and variation in the distance from the "deictic center," i.e., from the pronoun representing the self of the speaker ('I' in English, ia in Russian). In large bodies of texts such as those analyzed here, length of clauses can be measured by the ratio of nouns to verbs. Expression of difference can be measured by the ratios of various coordinating conjunctions and of forms of negation. Distance from the deictic center can be measured by the ratio of third person, second person and first person plural forms to the first person, as well as ratios of possessive to personal pronouns.
Conceptual distance increases with the ratio of nouns to verbs. When Russians feel distant from another person, their speech complies with the elaborate rules of Russian grammar; when they feel closer, their application of grammar rules becomes more flexible. In particular, they begin to delete otherwise compulsory parts of clauses. Because deletion reduces the length of clauses, Russians experience elongated clauses as communicating more distance between themselves and the speaker or writer (Yokoyama 1994, 83-84). Clause length in turn varies with the ratio of nouns to verbs. The modal clause in English (and Russian is similar) consists of two noun phrases separated by one verb phrase (Givon 1993, 209). As each noun or verb phrase consists of one noun or verb plus its associated words (prepositions, adjectives, adverbs, etc.), the ratio of nouns to verbs measures whether the speaker is elongating clauses by adding more noun phrases to each verb phrase. Of course, noun phrases can be replaced by pronouns or by other parts of speech. Because replacement of noun phrases is especially common when participants in dialogue share assumptions about the referents of their discussion, the modal ratio of nouns to verbs may exceed the mean ratio, especially in communication among persons who feel close. Experimental studies in English confirm the inference from linguists' observations that the ratio of nouns to verbs will increase when speakers seek estrangement and decrease when speakers seek closer interpersonal relations (Fielding and Fraser 1978; Brown and Fraser 1979).
Conceptual distance increases with the frequency of the conjunction "and" relative to "but" and of the negative prefix ("un-" and its variants) relative to the negative particle ("not" and its variants). Conjunctions and negation express similarity and difference. Copulative conjunctions (English "and," Russian i) link topics said to be similar in some respect. Adversative and contrastive conjunctions (English "but," Russian a and no) link topics said to be different in some respect (Lakoff 1971; Schiffrin 1987, 182-189). Negation expresses difference because many sentences using the negative particle ("not," ne, and variants) can be construed only by formulating the corresponding sentence in the positive (Hodge and Kress 1993, 137). Both English and Russian also offer the option of expressing negation by affixing negative prefixes ("un-," "in-," "ne-") to certain words. In contrast to the negative particle, which may negate a particular word, a phrase, or a whole sentence (Paducheva 1974, 143-160), the negative prefix applies negation more narrowly to the prefixed word. Accordingly, substitution of negative prefixes for negative particles restricts opportunities to express difference.
Choices to express similarity or difference vary conceptual distance because people interpret language by their ordinary experience. Seen up close, most pairs of objects display many differences of detail. Accordingly, when speakers or writers confine themselves to describing objects as similar overall, they position themselves further away from the objects (cf. White 1989). If increase in differentiation reduces conceptual distance, authoritarian speech will seem more distant if the frequency of copulatives is high relative to the frequency of adversatives and contrastives and if negation by particles is infrequent relative to negation by prefixes.
Conceptual distance increases with the frequency of the third person, second person and first person plural relative to the first person singular and with the frequency of possessive relative to personal pronouns. "Distance," of course, can be vertical as well as horizontal. By using pronouns other than "I" to a listener or reader who conceives himself or herself in the singular, speakers and writers can enlarge themselves relative to each member of the audience.
In all languages, pronouns construct social identity by positioning the self relative to the other and others relative to the self. Positioning occurs relative to the "deictic center" or reference to the self in English and Russian (Wilson 1990, 48-76). Collective pronouns ("we," collective "you") and third-person nouns distance the speaker from the egalitarian "I-thou" of conversation. Using collective "we," speakers and writers present themselves as numerically and conceptually superior to the individual who hears or reads the text (Brown and Gilman 1960, 251). Similarly, in languages which like Russian use the collective second-person as a polite term of address for persons unfamiliar to the speaker, speakers who feel more distant are more likely to use the collective second-person (Paulston 1976, Bates and Benigni 1975). Third-person pronouns have much the same effect as a preponderance of nouns: they redirect speech from the building of interpersonal ties between speaker and hearer to a conversation about a topic. Third-person pronouns convert the action into something that the speaker and audience passively watch instead of something they actively do (Garcia 1983, 186-187). Diez (1986, 229-230) finds that when one side in a conflictual negotiation tries to establish mutual recognition of its superior power, both sides begin using impersonal, third-person passive constructions (see also Errington, 1988, for this phenomenon in Javanese krama; Scott 1990, 31, for an example from Malay; Zaitseva, 1994, 115-117, for Russian). Finally, by comparison to personal pronouns that act as entities performing or affected by actions, possessive pronouns subordinate personhood to the objects designated by the nouns which they modify. If hearers and readers conceive themselves as individual persons rather than as collectivities, topics, or attributes of some object, authoritarian rulers can increase metaphorical distance by language that avoids the deictic center, that relies more heavily on the third "non-person," and that makes increased use of possessives relative to personal pronouns.
As evidence of declining iconic distance from authoritarian to transitional to electoral Russian, I present the ratio of nouns to verbs, the ratios of conjunctions expressing similarity to conjunctions expressing difference and of negation by prefixes to negation by particles, and the ratios of third-person and collective pronouns to first-person pronouns and of possessives to personals. As evidence of rapprochement between political speech and the Russian vernacular, I compare each of these ratios with the same ratio computed from data in two large studies of a wide variety of Russian texts (Zasorina 1977, Loenngren 1993). In each case I provide significance tests of the null hypothesis that the observations are drawn from samples with equal proportions of the indicators. The significance tests proceed by a conservative method treating each of the fifty texts from the authoritarian, transitional and egalitarian periods as one observation for that period, weighted by its length in words. Each significance test asks whether chance could produce the observed difference between the weighted mean of fifty observed proportions in one period and the weighted mean of fifty observed proportions in the later period. One-tailed significance is reported.
The woman in Leningrad was right to call attention to "all those nouns in a row." Because people establish distance by increasing the proportion of nouns to verbs in their speech, I hypothesized that a need to discourage popular attempts at influencing decisions would cause authoritarian rulers to use the most nouns relative to verbs, transition leaders to use an intermediate proportion of nouns, and electoral politicians to use the fewest nouns relative to verbs. Table 1 displays the ratio of nouns to verbs in the three types of texts and shows that the electoral ratio is closest to the ratio for all kinds of Russian texts. Accumulation of nouns in authoritarian Russian achieved what a study officially authorized during the Brezhnev era (Vasil'eva 1982, 104) praised as "monumentality of the forms and resonance of speech." Monumentality was a metaphor for distance: monuments are visible only if the onlooker is standing back.
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Table 1 about here
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The surfeit of nouns in authoritarian Russian results from sentences exemplified by (3), drawn from a 1976 speech by the former Ukrainian party leader Shcherbitskii:
3) "CC [a contraction of "Central Committee"] of our party and the government are engaged daily with issues of fuller satisfaction of growing demands and requirements of the population."
This sentence elongates both the agent ("CC of our party and the government") and the object of action ("issues of satisfaction of growing demands and requirements of the population") by using three nouns for the agent and five for the object of action, when one noun would have sufficed to designate each, as in (4), which authoritarian Russian avoided:
(4) The party tries to satisfy increasing popular wants more fully.
Authoritarian Russian also increased the proportion of nouns relative to verbs by frequent "nominalization"--conversion of verbs to nouns (Seriot 1985, 159). The usefulness of nominalization for authoritarians may be seen in sentence (5), taken from a speech by the former chief of Soviet economic administration, Kosygin:
(5) "The most important assignment of state and collective farms is improvement of yields...."
Kosygin could have said sentence (6):
(6) I assign farmers to increase the crop they harvest from each hectare.... This assignment is most important to both state and collective farms.
Sentence (5) contains neither agents nor objects affected by action; instead one action converted into an abstract object ("improvement of yields") is a condition of another action converted into another abstract object ("the most important assignment of state and collective farms"). An impersonal object conceals Kosygin's personal responsibility (Wells 1960, 217; Hodge and Kress 1993, 20-23). Authoritarian Russian blurs personal responsibility, personal agency, and concrete actions by avoiding the sentence pair (6). In this pair of sentences, the agent is a single individual ("I" referring to Kosygin) who acts on identifiable people ("farmers"). They then become the agents of two further actions ("increase" and "harvest") on a single object ("crop"). Kosygin's personal will is revealed as an explicit condition ("is most important") for farms of all kinds. Sentence pair (6) not only identifies agents and objects of action, but it also shortens the units linked by the verbs.
Authoritarian Russian's elongated descriptions of the agents and objects of political action separated official speech from the vernacular, as noted by Vasil'eva (1982, 5): "the unwieldy sentences of [official Russian] are obviously not intended for reproduction in interpersonal conversation, especially not in oral form--people do not talk this language." The gradual disappearance of elongated clauses in transitional and electoral Russian has closed this gap.
Because objects described in a more differentiated manner seem closer, and conjunctions and negation express difference, the frequency of various conjunctions and kinds of negation should vary from authoritarian to electoral Russian. Copulative conjunctions expressing similarity between coordinate elements should be most frequent, relative to adversative and contrastive conjunctions expressing difference, in the authoritarian texts, intermediate in the transitional texts, and least frequent in electoral texts. Table 2 shows that as texts are drawn from less authoritarian eras, the relative frequency of conjunctions expressing similarity and difference converges toward the norm for all kinds of texts.
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Table 2 about here
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The excess of copulatives in authoritarian Russian was attributable to a plenitude of combinations with compulsory order and copulative conjunction. A typical example is the elements linked by "and" in a sentence taken from a speech by Brezhnev:
(7) "The party and the people highly value the labor of scientists working in agriculture" (emphasis added).
Sentence (8) was absolutely prohibited:
(8) The party highly values the work of agricultural scientists, but the people believe the scientists' work is inadequate.
In fact, one of three accusations against Yeltsin, when he was ousted from the Moscow committee of the Communist Party in 1987, was Gorbachev's complaint that Yeltsin had juxtaposed the party's schedule for the completion of perestroika against the people's "wave-form" enthusiasm for perestroika, saying that popular enthusiasm had been high in January 1987 but had fallen by June (Izvestiia TsK KPSS 1989 1:240-241). Yeltsin sinned not even by hinting that the people opposed or criticized perestroika, but merely by distinguishing between the Party's schedule and the people's attitudes.
By prohibiting verbal differentiation among such social aggregates as the "party and people" or the "working class, collective farm peasantry, and popular intelligentsia," authoritarian Russian precluded expression of the contrasts among social interests that, theorists argue (e.g., Rustow 1970, Schattschneider 1968), draw people into politics and that make democratic citizens more likely to vote across cultures (Granberg 1993).
Replacement of authoritarian by transitional and electoral texts is also predicted to result in displacement of the negative prefix, which restricts the scope of negation, by negative particles, which expand the scope of negation. Table 3 shows that the negative prefixes are replaced by the negative particles and that the proportion in the electoral texts is closest to the norm for all kinds of texts.
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Table 3 about here
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Gorbachev said explicitly that limits on negatives in authoritarian speech reduced Russians' interest in participation. In 1987 he told a convocation of journalists: "When you and we painted life in pink colors, the people saw it all and lost interest in the press and in public activity. They felt humiliated and insulted when such phony stuff was palmed off on them" (quoted in Gustafson 1988, 200). As electoral Russian has acquired the capacity to communicate negatives as well as positives, differences as well as similarities, it has become more suitable for making people feel psychologically involved in politics.
To diminish conceptual distance from the audience, electoral speakers should move toward the deictic center--the first person singular--and away from possessive forms that subordinate person to objects. Tables 4 and 5 display the predicted shift toward reference to the self of the speaker or writer, observable in Table 4 for personal and possessive forms of the first two persons separately and in Table 5 for the combination of personal and possessive forms of the third and first persons. Table 6 displays the other predicted shift, from possessive to personal forms.
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Tables 4, 5, and 6 about here
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The shifts displayed in Tables 4, 5, and 6 heighten the prominence of the individual relative to the collective and of persons relative to objects. Thus changes in the pronominal system reinforce the effects found in the changing relation of nouns to verbs and of conjunction and negation. Politics becomes an interaction among persons rather than objects, persons become active participants rather than passive onlookers, and because the agents are individuals rather than collective entities, spoken representations of politics can accommodate more diversity. In all these respects, discussion of politics by electoral politicians becomes more similar to other texts encountered by the citizen and seems more familiar. If citizens conceive themselves as persons rather than things, and as individuals rather than groups, the change in pronouns from authoritarian to electoral Russian converts politicians into individual persons with whom citizens find it easier to identify.
As Vasil'eva commented, with official approval, authoritarian Russian was not intended to represent a communication among persons. Instead "one part of society or one social group expresses its position toward another part of society or another social group" (1982, 26). The objective of authoritarian speech was to develop "the person's capacity to conceive his optimal place as a cell in the public organism..." (ibid., 18). Electoral Russian is less likely to depict persons as bits of a social object. Instead it tells the Russian citizen that politics concerns personal choices and actions.
Has the Russian of politics changed, and do the changes parallel those observed in other societies moving from authoritarianism toward democracy? If democracy depends on popular belief in the efficacy of participation, and if that belief depends in part on the iconicity of political language, authoritarian speech can discourage participation by setting rulers apart and above, while electoral speech encourages it by bringing the politician close to the people. Contemporary Russian politicians have considerably reduced the conceptual distance that separated authoritarian rulers of the Soviet Union from the people. By every measure the iconicity of electoral speech is quantitatively much closer to Russian found in other contexts than the iconicity of authoritarian speech. Shorter clauses in electoral Russian make politics seem less imposing and more approachable. Increased differentiation among political objects portrays politics in closer focus. Persons are more likely to be agents of politics and less likely to be attributes of impersonal objects. Speakers are more likely to present themselves as numerically equal to the listener or reader and more likely to present politics as something a person does rather than views. Electoral Russian instantiates the ordinary language that Geis (1987) deems most effective for democratic politicians.
Quantitatively closer to authoritarian speech in some respects and to electoral speech in other respects, the iconicity of the transitional Politburo positioned its members in a stance intermediate between authoritarian officials and the Russian people. Change in the iconicity of transitional speech refutes the hypothesis that institutional incentives determine political speech, although not that incentives shape it. While the texts used for analysis of the transitional Politburo's speech are taken from the same year that the Politburo introduced contested elections for the national legislature, only one of the Politburo members included in the sample (Iakovlev) ever ran for political office in a contested election decided by a popular vote, and he did not become an electoral candidate until December 1993, more than four years after giving his speech analyzed here. Even though the procedures used to select Politburo members in 1989 were identical to the procedures used to select the Politburo under Brezhnev, despite facing the same institutional incentives the transitional Politburo moved the iconicity of its public speech substantially closer to the Russian vernacular.
Neither socioeconomic modernization nor the specifics of communist ideology can account for the evidence I have reported. In contrast to a hypothesis that change in political speech reflects whether socioeconomic conditions favor democracy, Russian politicians' speech is becoming more suited to democracy as socioeconomic conditions deteriorate. Russian society did not modernize noticeably between 1989 and 1993, but political speech changed sharply. The Russian of Communist ideology shares its surfeit of nouns with Nazi German (Townson 1992, 131; Bork 1970; Widmer 1966, 29), its cumbersome sentences with militarist Greek and Ottoman Turkish (Frangoudaki 1992, 369; Kiernan 1991, 205-206), and its generalized separateness from the vernacular with official speech encountered in an extraordinary variety of historical authoritarianisms.
Change in political speech also cannot be dismissed as merely instrumental. For an instrumental view of speech to be admissible, its users would need to know that they were manipulating the proportion of nouns to verbs, adversative and contrastive to copulative conjunctions, negative particles to negative prefixes, third-person and plural to first-person singular pronouns, or possessive to personal pronouns. But speakers and writers are customarily unaware of iconicity even as they exploit it to communicate. Constructing rulers as distant and politicians as close, political speech both responds to and influences other material and social conditions and personal behaviors that affect the choice of authoritarian or democratic institutions.
Contemporary Russian politicians' reduction of the conceptual distance that formerly separated Soviet authoritarians from the people may be offsetting some of the negative effects of economic deterioration, social decay, governmental corruption, and violation of human rights on Russians' evaluations of democracy. Authoritarian speech that sets rulers apart and above tells people they are inferior and incompetent. If people resent that implication, even people who express no normative commitment to democracy, and otherwise experience negative consequences from life in democracy, may still welcome a gain in symbolic equality. Moreover, people who think politics is accessible may be willing to participate in the correction of socioeconomic decay when people who think politics beyond their reach would remain passive. If so, even Russian politicians who disavow democracy may be reluctant to relinquish the popular approval that they gain by practicing the speech of electoral politics.
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Table 1: Decrease in Nouns Relative to Verbs
Type of Text Nouns per Verb
Authoritarian 3.4
Transitional 2.7
Electoral 2.0
Vernacular(1) n/a
Vernacular(2) 1.6
Significance Authoritarian to Transitional: F(1,98)=14.92 p<0.0001 Transitional to Electoral: F(1,98)=13.70 p<0.0002 Authoritarian to Electoral: F(1,98)=35.92 p<0.00003
(1) Loenngren does not report a ratio of nouns to verbs.
(2) Zasorina.
a. Ratios are computed by classifying parts of speech in random samples consisting of five percent of all strings in the fifty texts according to the rules given in Zasorina. Nouns are then divided by the sum of verbs plus verbal participles with dependent words.
Table 2: Expression of Difference by Simple Conjunctions(a)
Type of Text Copulatives per
Adversative and Contrastive
Authoritarian 12.2
Transitional 5.0
Electoral 1.7
Vernacular(1) 3.0
Vernacular(2) 2.3
Significance Authoritarian to Transitional: F(1,97)=57.53 p<0.00003 Transitional to Electoral: F(1,98)=53.68 p<0.00003 Authoritarian to Electoral: F(1,98)=138.51 p<0.00003
(1) Loenngren.
(2) Zasorina.
a. The ratio is the number of occurrences of "i" (either as a conjunction or particle) divided by the sum of the number of occurrences of a and the number of occurrences of no, both net of gradationals (ne tol'ko... no i, a takzhe, da i, and no i). Removal of gradationals is not possible for Zasorina and Loenngren, but this operation has little impact on the ratios for the political speeches.
Table 3: Expression of Difference by Negation
Content Words Containing the Negative Prefix ("ne-")(a)
in Proportion to
Negative Particles -- "No" ("net"), "Not" ("ne"), "Neither" ("ni") -- and the Negative Modal "Cannot" ("nel'zia")
Type of Text Negative Prefixes Per Occurrence of
Negative Particles or Modal
Authoritarian 1.01
Transitional 0.77
Electoral 0.33
Vernacular(1) n/a
Vernacular(2) 0.35
Significance Authoritarian to Transitional: F(1,97)=7.53 p<0.0036 Transitional to Electoral: F(1,98)=47.98 p<0.00003 Authoritarian to Electoral: F(1,98)=83.31 p<0.00003
(1) Loenngren excludes infrequent words with negative prefixes.
(2) Zasorina.
(a) Excluded from the count are such common words as nemnogo "few," nekotorye "some," nikakoi "none," and other similar terms. To the extent that these words express negation at all, they negate not the prefixed word but the semantic unit following the whole word.
Table 4: Distribution of Second Person, First Person Plural, and First Person Singular
Personals Possessives
"You" "We" "Your" "Our"
per "I" per "I" per "My" per "My"
Type of Text
Authoritarian 1.3 7.3 3.1 84.5
Transitional .5 4.9 .9 23.2
Electoral .4 1.6 .5 2.6
Vernacular(1) .2 .9 .3 2.6
Vernacular(2) .5 .4 .6 1.5
Significance
Authoritarian to Transitional:
"You" per "I" F(1,87)=13.39 p<0.0002
"We" per "I" F(1,96)=2.92 p<0.0454
"Your" per "My" F(1,59)=7.28 p<.00046
"Our" per "My" F(1,98)=6.15 p<0.007
Transitional to Electoral:
"You" per "I" F(1,85)=1.22 p<0.1312
"We" per "I" F(1,96)=24.81 p<0.00003
"Your" per "My" F(1,63)=2.10 p<0.07513
"Our" per "My" F(1,95)=34.32 p<0.00003
Authoritarian to Electoral:
"You" per "I" F(1,88)=18.80 p<0.00003
"We" per "I" F(1,98)=39.44 p<0.00003
"Your" per "My" F(1,64)=18.54 p<0.00005
"Our" per "My" F(1,95)=49.99 p<0.00003
(1) Loenngren.
(2) Zasorina.
Table 5: Ratio of Third Person (Singular and Plural) to First Person Singular
(Possessives and Personal Pronouns Combined)
third person
Type of Text singular and plural
Authoritarian 9.8
Transitional 4.5
Electoral 2.0
Vernacular(1) 5.3
Vernacular(2) 1.8
Significance Authoritarian to Transitional: F(1,98)=10.26 p<0.0009 Transitional to Electoral: F(1,98)=15.00 p<0.0001 Authoritarian to Electoral: F(1,98)=44.96 p<0.00003
(1) Loenngren.
(2) Zasorina.
Table 6: Ratio of Possessives to Personal Pronouns
(First and Second Persons Only)
Type of Text Possessives
Per Personal
Authoritarian 1.2
Transitional .5
Electoral .3
Vernacular(1) .3
Vernacular(2) .2
(1) Loenngren.
(2) Zasorina.
Significance Authoritarian to Transitional: F(1,98)=52.55 p<0.00003 Transitional to Electoral: F(1,98)=13.50 p<0.0002 Authoritarian to Electoral: F(1,98)=131.4 p<0.00003