Foreign Words Pronunciation in a Political Key: Details of the Scioli-Macri Debate (and its Repercussions)

Abstract

In 2015, a presidential election in the second round took place in Argentina for the first time. Among the various instances of public exposition of the opinions and proposals of Daniel Scioli and Mauricio Macri, the candidates for the presidency with the most votes in the corresponding general elections, the debate that took place between both candidates in the School of Law of the University of Buenos Aires, one week before the ballotage, occupied a preponderant place. This interaction was a strictly regulated one, in which the candidates had, alternately, brief periods of time to present their vision and action plan relative to previously defined thematic groups, as well as to ask and answer each other. The strategies that Scioli and Macri used in this framework, with restricted possibilities but with extreme public visibility, were widely analyzed by political analysts and discurse scholars. However, the phonetic-phonological peculiarities of the respective interventions, which were conversely discussed at that time by users of different social networks, have not been a specific object of attention yet. This paper constitutes a first approach to the analysis of these peculiarities, with the focus on the divergent realization, in relation to the conventional one, of lexical units recognized as non-Spanish: details that, although ignored even in the published transcriptions of the debate, were "denounced" in comments and virtual exchanges that (in a wide spectrum of inferences) gave these atypical pronunciations an indexical character regarding the supposed personal characteristics of the candidates.