Type-token plots in The Economist
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From "The Harris-Trump debate will be a clash of speaking styles", The Economist 9/6/2024:
The Economist's article covers some other easily-quantifiable aspects of political rhetoric, but this afternoon I'll focus on the type-token plots, since this an an especially consistent aspect of Donald Trump in comparison to other politicians:
"Political vocabulary display", 9/10/2015
"Vocabulary display in the CNN debate", 9/18/2015
"R2D2", 3/27/2016
"More political text analytics", 4/15/2016
As I've suggested in the past, the main cause is Trump's repetitive style. His shallow type-token graphs are probably not due to a penchant for "plain speaking" — at least, there are stereotypical exemplars of lower-class speech style with robustly-growing type-token graphs, as discussed in "Vicky Pollard's Revenge", 1/2/2007.
On the other hand, Ernest Hemingway's writing style exhibits slower type-token growth than any other English novelist I've tested: "Lexical display rates in novels", 4/18/2020. That's not because Hemingway writes in a repetitive style — it's an interesting question what causes it, and what it has something to do with his (false) reputation for short sentences (see "Death before syntax", 10/20/2014).
Jerry Packard said,
September 7, 2024 @ 8:53 am
Great work – thanks Mark.