This paper aims to compare automatic and manually corrected annotation data in the Icelandic Gigaword Corpus. We focus on the variable use of Stylistic Fronting (SF) in Icelandic, an optional movement of words or phrases, which indicates a more formal style. Examining SF rates across time, we find that manual coding results in slightly lower SF rates than automatic coding. This difference can be explained by the different sources used in the coding process: For automatic coding, written transcripts compiled by parliament employees are used, and for manual correction, coding relies on audio files of the parliament speeches. Importantly, both types of coding are well suited to trace changing patterns of SF over a span of 16 years, suggesting that the automatic feature extraction reliably reflects the speeches that have been transcribed.

We examine how the elements that introduce relative clauses, namely relative complementizers and relative pronouns, evolve over the history of Icelandic using the phrase structure analysis of the IcePaHC treebank. The rate of these elements changes over time and, in the case of relative pronouns, is subject to effects of genre and the type of gap in the relative clause in question. Our paper is a digital humanities study of historical linguistics which would not be possible without a parsed corpus that spans all centuries involved in the change. We relate our findings to studies on the Constant Rate Effect by analyzing these effects in detail.

We examine individual lifespan change in the speech of an Icelandic MP, Þorgerður Gunnarsdóttir, who style-shifts after she switches parties, by becoming less formal as her political stance becomes more liberal. We make use of the resources of the Icelandic Gigaword Corpus, more specifically the Parliament section of that corpus, demonstrating how the reinvention of an identity in politics can be tracked by studying the collection of speeches given by a politician over time.

Political speech is an active area of investigation and the ongoing ERC project Explaining Individual Lifespan Change (EILisCh) expands on some of the previous findings in this area. Previous work has found that political speech can differ based on party membership in a time-wise static environment and it has also been uncovered that individual politicians can change their linguistic behavior over time. In this paper, we pursue a novel topic in this area, the evolution of language use of entire political parties over time. We focus on Icelandic political parties and their use of Stylistic Fronting from 1999 to 2021, with a particular emphasis on the years around the financial crisis of 2008, and the subsequent years. Our results show that parties in a position of power typically speak more formally, using more Stylistic Fronting, but that at the same time there are some exceptions to this pattern. We highlight the significance of relying on a large speech corpus, when applying a high-definition approach to linguistic analyses across time.