Inaugural embedding again

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"Inaugural Embedding", 9/9/2005:

0
1
2
3
4
Mean
Sentence
Length
Washington1789
629
(44%)
554
(39%)
206
(14%)
36
(3%)
5
(<1%)
60
Lincoln1865
440
(63%)
222
(32%)
38
(5%)
0
0
26
Bush2005
1842
(88%)
244
(12%)
4
(<1%)
0
0
22
Trump2017
1264
(87%)
178
(12%)
15
(1%)
0
0
15

"The evolution of disornamentation", 3/1/2005

"Elaborate interiors and plain language", 6/3/2016.

 



5 Comments

  1. Inaugural embedding again • Zhi Chinese said,

    January 22, 2017 @ 7:12 pm

    […] Source: Language Inaugural embedding again […]

  2. Michael Stoler said,

    January 22, 2017 @ 7:25 pm

    How about Obama 2009 and 2013?

    [(myl) Mean sentence lengths:

    Obama2009 20
    Obama2013 23

    Don't have time to work out the embeddings this evening.]

  3. David Morris said,

    January 22, 2017 @ 8:39 pm

    His mean sentence length is 8 words? Which means (sorry) that approximately half of his sentences are shorter than that??

    [(myl) Oops — bug in the program — typed the wrong variable name. The mean is actually 14.9 words, median 13. Here's the speech one sentence per line.]

  4. Adam F said,

    January 23, 2017 @ 4:02 am

    Are the sentences taken from an official printed version of the speech or a transcription? It seems to me that there's some wiggle room in a transcription; whether you cut a sentence or use a semi-colon, for example, is subjective. ;-)

    [(myl) Indeed. I made this point at some length in "More Flesch-Kincaid grade-level nonsense", 10/23/2015, where I observed that plausible alternative punctuation decisions could alter the (in any case silly) Flesch-Kincaid estimate of the "grade level" of a passage from Donald Trump's presidential announcement from grade level 4.4 to grade level 12.5.

    For the "inaugural embedding" experiment, te texts come from the versions at the American Presidency Project, which I've trusted to be based on the original sources. For that purpose, I was not at all interested in sentence length, but only in clausal embedding, which is not affected by turning periods into dashes, semicolons or colons.]

  5. Lane said,

    January 23, 2017 @ 5:07 am

    Since Obama is considered the most successful formal orator of the modern presidential age I'd also vote for a comparison with one of his.

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