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Discrimination in discourses 387

the subordinate causal clause: a verb-second position after the German subjunc-
tion “weil” (“because”) would be typical for spoken language, but is not for a
letter like the one Haider ascribed to Muzicant (apart from the fact that such a
letter would have been written in English).
The third and fourth stereotypes are implicitly verbalized in the allusive
predication of criminality contained in the quoted extract. Among the discursive
features which support discriminating associations with these two antisemitic
prejudices are four peculiarities: (1) The first one relates to nomination and per-
spectivation. Haider phonetically distorts the surname of the Jewish president,
articulating “Muzicant” with [ts] instead of [s]. This distancing perspectivation
by alienating nomination is combined with the syntactic realization of “Der
Herr Ariel Muzicant” as an isolated “free topic” that is segmented by two rel-
evance pauses. Both of these features are suited to open for the audience a po-
tential space of associations with the name of the Jewish president, all the more
since the determining article “der” in Austrian German suggests that the person
named “Ariel Muzicant” is well-known. This nomination is followed (2) by the
allusive homonymic and antithetic play on words based on a fallacious topos of
name interpretation, i.e. argumentum ad nominem. In a syntactically not well-
formed conditional formulation, Haider plays with the contrast between the
proper name “Ariel”, which is both a male Jewish first name and the name of a
detergent (i.e. an ergonym) that connotes cleanness, purity, and the criminaliz-
ing German idiom “Dreck am Stecken haben” meaning “to have dirt (sticking)
on the stick”, with the implication of having a shady, criminal past. The implicit
fallacious argumentation scheme can generally be explicated by the conditional
paraphrase: If a person carries a specific proper name, the (denotative or conno-
tative) meaning of this proper name also applies to the person her- or himself. In
the concrete case, the argumentum ad nominem means: If a male’s name is
“Ariel”, he should be a person with a pure, clean character. (3) The third lin-
guistic particularity of the quoted passage is the strategic intensification of the
criminalizing predication by “so much”. In the given context, the deictic ex-
pression “so” points to an undefined, sensually not perceptible aspect in the
speaker’s and listeners’ mental “space of imagination”. If the listeners’ space of
imagination” contains allusive paths leading to antisemitic prejudices, the alleg-
edly large amount of dirt (“much”) is de-coded in a way as to be associated with
the stereotypes of “the dirty, impure Jew” and “the business-minded, tricky,
fraudulent, criminal Jew”. (4) The fervent applause as an indicator of agreement
with the content of Haider’s insult and the laughter of the primary audience as a
sign of being amused by Haider’s utterance show that the speaker’s message
well reaches his first addressees in the room. In view of the fact that these lis-
teners are first and foremost followers and sympathizers of the far-right party
which is the successor organization of the “Verband der Unabhängigen” (VdU;
“Association of Independents”), a political melting pot for former National So-