Language Log

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"]

We seem to be entering new lexico-political territory, which is increasingly challenging the publications guidelines of the mainstream media:

Andrew Rosenthal, "Donald Trump defends his hands", NYT 3/3/2016
Gregory King, "Donald Trump defends size of his penis", CNN 3/4/2016
"Mitt Romney Aims at Donald Trump, Hits G.O.P.", NYT Editorial 3/3/2016:

    Holy Mitt, what a meltdown.

James Poniewozik, "A National Descent Into Trump's Pants", NYT 3/4/2016

Or  maybe this is just part of the blurring of boundaries between private and public spheres? See e.g. "Taking shit from the president", LLOG 7/19/2006.

After last night's doozy of a Republican debate, Meghan McCain tweeted the following this morning:

Every negative stereotype I have tried to combat for the last 8 years about republicans has been utterly destroyed in the past 9 months.

— Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) March 4, 2016

McCain's dim view of the current crop of presidential candidates doesn't support the notion that they are "utterly destroying" negative stereotypes about Republicans, as several people pointed out. Quite the opposite, in fact.