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Before examining discourse structures, however, there are some factors that are to be considered as part of the overall context that regulates the length and content of the speeches. Firstly, since they take place in a legislative setting (and specifically the House and Senate floors), they are constrained by time, with each of the House speeches having been allocated only one minute. The Senate speeches, however, are much longer, which is likely due to the upper chamber having far fewer members than the lower chamber (100 to 435), thus allowing more time to be granted per legislator and the legislators themselves to be more verbose.

The time is allotted by the presiding officer of the session, who, in the lower chamber, holds the title Speaker, while in the upper chamber, he or she is referred to as President. Constitutionally, the Vice President of the United States is the President of the Senate, in whose absence a formally chosen President pro tempore presides, but today most Senate sessions are presided over by junior senators who are advised by the Senate Parliamentarian (Mershon 2011). Similarly in the House, the Speaker regularly delegates presiding powers to lower-ranking representatives, always of his or her own party. The presiding officer is addressed as “President” or “Speaker,” with the preceding honorific “Mister” or “Madam,” even when he or she is presiding pro tempore. Members of Congress will therefore begin their speeches by addressing the respective presiding officer, after which they proceed to make use of the time allotted them to discuss the topic they find of import.

Context also influences the way legislators will address each other, resulting in such deictic phrases as “my colleagues,” “my friend from Michigan” and “the gentlewoman from California.” In congressional as in parliamentary discourse, typically only the presiding officer is addressed directly in the second person, whereas other members are referred to in the third person, unless they are included in collective first-person pronouns such as in “we in the House” and “we Democrats.” Both of these phrases also show the importance of group membership or “the discursive polarization of Us and Them,” which reflects “the models and social representations of speakers as _{group members”} (van Dijk 2002, 226).

Related to this binary group membership are contextual factors stemming from the American electoral system. Since the country uses first-past-the-post voting, wherein each electoral district is entitled to one officeholder who wins by gaining a plurality of votes, the result is a two-party system with only

the occasional independent legislator on the national level (such as Senator Angus King). It is therefore not atypical of members of Congress to use such expressions as bipartisan and both sides

of the aisle, the latter having been used, as shown by an online search of the Congressional Record,

over 18,000 times since the opening of the 104th Congress in January 1995. While aforementioned expressions often attempt to unify (i.e. setting aside partisan differences to support a specific proposal on which there might be more agreement across the political spectrum), others can also be polarizing: “The failure to produce this budget begs the question: Are our friends across the aisle concerned about our national debt? Again, I refer to the Speaker's words: No budget, no values” (Hern 2019: H3071; emphasis added).

Another context variable relates to the fact that congressional debate is televised, live streamed and recorded for later viewing, which means that while legislators may be primarily communicating to each other, they also have the opportunity to appeal to their constituents and the American public as a whole. Bailey (2004, 11–12) argues that while parliamentary discourse is “probably consulted by very few” despite its generally easy availability, “political debate does not take place in a void,” as evidenced not only by the party, constituent and pressure group interests that politicians need to uphold, but also the fact that their contributions to political discourse are subject to media coverage that affects their public image. There are, indeed, rather drastic examples of congressional debate that, in all likelihood, would not have enfolded the same way had it not been for the presence of cameras: on March 27, 2019, Republican Senator Mike Lee—mentioned previously in Chapter 2— mocked the recently introduced Green New Deal stimulus program by incorporating into his presentation images from popular culture (including Star Wars and a velociraptor-riding Ronald Reagan), his stated goal being to consider the proposal “with the seriousness it deserves” (Hayes 2019).

Finally, context also includes knowledge, beliefs and goals. Knowledge is manifested namely in the body of background knowledge that senators and representatives expect of each other and any extra- congressional entities they may seek to influence with their speeches. As van Dijk (2002, 226) points out, some knowledge may be presupposed—seen as not warranting any explicit explanations if assumed to be decipherable from the overall context, as is often the case with deictic expressions. Political speech also reflects a goal of some sort, whether it is to defend or challenge executive policy, and beliefs, which are the personal mental models politicians construct of issues and groups. As will be seen below, knowledge, beliefs and goals invariably play a role in political discourse.

These factors demonstrate the effect context has on the personal mental models that political speakers construct for specific instances of discourse and, naturally, the discourse structures present in their speeches. The analysis of this section will henceforth examine the discourse structures found in the research material and some of the cognitive-contextual factors that explain them.