Language Log

Over the past few days the British media (newspapers and BBC news programs) have been talking about a crucially linguistic argument that President Obama is being manipulated, and literally told what to say, by the UK prime minister's office. (Links seem superfluous: the Google News UK edition will give you thousands of references.) The evidence comes from a single choice of lexical item.

During the two working days Obama spent in Britain, the main news-generating event was a news conference in which he directly addressed the issue of whether the UK should remain in the European Union or leave it. A key argument for those who believe in leaving the EU (the proponents of Brexit) has been that new trade agreements could readily be set up once the country was free from the shackles of EU membership. Specifically, a trade agreement could be readily set up with the USA. Not so fast, said Obama: the USA will continue its negotiating efforts aimed at setting up a trade agreement with the whole EU, and if the UK left that grouping (the largest single market in the world) it would "be in the back of the queue" if it applied to get a special UK/US trade agreement established.

The Brexit crew jumped on the use of the word queue. Americans talk about waiting in line, not waiting in a queue or queueing up. "The back of the queue" is characteristic British English, and no American would say any such thing, they insisted. Obama's remarks must have been prepared for him by British pro-EU politicians. Are the Brexiteers right?

Here's an unexpected factoid from the transcripts of the 21 debates held so far in the current U.S. presidential campaign: Despite his "Make America Great Again" slogan, Donald Trump uses the words America and American almost 13 times less often than Bernie Sanders does.

As I mentioned a few days ago ("More political text analytics", 4/15/2016), I've now got more-or-less cleaned-up text from the 21 debates held so far in the current U.S. presidential campaign.

[Update — with some help from Chris Culy, I've done additional clean-up on the debate texts, and therefore have revised the numbers in this post slightly, as of 4/23/2016. None of the numbers have changed a lot, and none of the qualitative implications have changed at all.]

If we focus on the contributions to those 21 debates of  the five remaining U.S. presidential candidates, we get 199,188 words in total, divided up like this:

This morning I'll add a few small examples of the kind of information that can be derived from a dataset of this type.

I spent a few minutes this morning getting transcripts for all 12 Republican and all 9 Democratic debates, and over the next few days I'll do some additional Breakfast Experiments™ on the results. One trivial thing is a complete type-token plot, from texts constructed by concatenating all the transcript pieces attributed to each remaining candidate across all the debates:

Unsurprisingly, the trends we saw earlier have continued: Cruz has the highest rate of vocabulary display, and Trump the lowest.

ICYMI, the median presidential candidate TV ad:

Recently on the Fox News program The Five, one of the participants came out with an expression that illustrates the forces behind the kinds of errors that we've called misnegations — even though the errant phrase lacks any overt negation at all!

Bemoaning "this fractured strife among the Republican party", Greg Gutfeld  said

And I just remember the good old days, where we could all unite against the hatred for Obama.

Presumably he meant "unite behind the hatred for Obama" or "unite in hatred against Obama" or  something like that, but got the polarity reversed on the combination of against, hatred, and for.

Now that there are effectively just two Republican and two Democratic presidential candidates left, I'm starting to get questions about comparing speaking styles across party boundaries. One simple approach is a type-token plot — this is a measure of the rate of vocabulary display, where the horizontal axis is the sequentially increasing number of words ("tokens"), and the vertical axis is the total number of distinct words ("types") at each step.

From reader Brad D:

You've been doing some interesting studies of Trump's speech patterns, and I wonder, have you done an analysis of his overall word choice since he started running for President?  Watching him speak in interviews, I often get the impression that he's translating his thoughts into small words so as not to seem to be speaking over the heads of his supporters (kind of like a political "Thing Explainer"). I'd be interested to know if there's any truth to that.

Brad added in a later note:

His overuse of simple adjectives does appear to be fairly consistent. "Good", "bad", "big", "smart", and "stupid" are the ones I notice most, but perhaps it's simply that he uses them when another word would be more precise. 

@LitCritTrump has taken up the Trump Insult Haiku form as an instrument of literary evaluation. My favorite:

Odysseus took 20 years to travel 600 miles. Would not want him as captain of my boat. BAD SAILOR pic.twitter.com/iZWpQhBwJQ

— Trump Reviews (@LitCritTrump) March 8, 2016

Powerpointsapper, "The Gettysburg Address – the Donald Trump Version", Angry Staff Officer 3/8/2016:

It was a long time ago – I don’t think anyone can even remember, but I can remember, I have a great memory, I’ve got the best memory ever. These guys, they made the most special thing, really, really special. Where everyone was free and everything was great, just the way I’ve made America, I really, really mean that.  

This, of course, translates the first sentence of the original:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

I didn't watch last night's Republican debate in Miami. Apparently it was a relatively sober affair — there were no penis comparisons, no one called anyone else a liar or a fraud or a con-man, there was hardly even any shouting or interrupting.

But several people have asked for a reprise of the type of analysis that I did back in September to compare Donald Trump's lexicon with Jeb Bush's ("The most Trumpish (and Bushish) words", 9/5/2015). So here it is, just for the words used in that 3/10/2016 debate.

Edward Wong, "Tibetan Entrepreneur Has Been Illegally Detained, Family Says" (NYT 3/10/16)

A Tibetan entrepreneur who is a vocal but moderate advocate for bilingual education in schools across Chinese-ruled Tibetan regions has been illegally detained by the police for one and a half months, his family said.

The man, Tashi Wangchuk, 30, who lives with his parents in the western town of Yushu, has written about language policy on his microblog. He has highlighted the dearth of meaningful Tibetan language education and expressed concern that many Tibetan children are unable to become fluent in their native language, a widespread worry in the ethnic group.

[fbvideo link="https://www.facebook.com/bgzimmer/videos/10153449291273506/" width="500" height="400" onlyvideo="0"]