{"id":28552,"date":"2016-09-30T08:28:30","date_gmt":"2016-09-30T13:28:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=28552"},"modified":"2016-09-30T09:07:29","modified_gmt":"2016-09-30T14:07:29","slug":"disfluencies-and-smiles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=28552","title":{"rendered":"Disfluencies and smiles"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>A couple of days ago, in a caf\u00e9 in Paris, \u00a0someone noticed a young woman intently watching the Clinton\/Trump debate, and commented \"Isn't watching the debate so much better than working?\" But the debate watcher was Ye Tian<\/a>, a postdoc at the\u00a0Laboratoire de linguistique formelle<\/a>, Universit\u00e9 Paris Diderot (Paris 7), part of a project whose acronym is DUEL — \"Disfluencies, Exclamations and Laughter in Dialogue<\/a>\". And so her interest in the video\u00a0was a professional one, with preliminary results that she published as a blog post here<\/a>. Ye Tian's analysis is reproduced below, with her permission, as a guest post.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

The Monday night presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton was apparently the most watched debate in American history. When I woke up today, my facebook was \u201c\u5237\u5c4f\u201d (screen-painted) by everyone\u2019s opinion on this, so I sat down, opened youtube and started watching. OK I didn\u2019t just watch. I thought, why don\u2019t I check out their disfluency patterns, and whether there were any smiles and laughter in this presumably hostile interaction? This took me a whole day. Someone in the cafe saw me watching the video and said, \u201cisn\u2019t watching the debate so much better than working?\u201d. I thought, \u201cthis is working!\u201d<\/p>\n

So here are some of my initial observations. People have the impression that Donald Trump is way more disfluent than Hilary Clinton, that he has a lot of incomplete sentences and that he repeats himself a lot. This is partly true. Trump and Clinton have very different types<\/em> of disfluency. However, in terms of occurrences of disfluencies, they are not so different.<\/p>\n

First, a few words of types of disfluencies. First there are silent and filled pauses. Pauses can be filled by things like \u201cum\u201d and \u201cuh\u201d, but also by \u201cdiscourse markers\u201d such as \u201cyou know\u201d, \u201cI mean\u201d, \u201clike\u201d etc. Second, there are repetitions. We sometimes repeat parts of what we said \u2013 can be as small as a syllable, or as large as a clause. Third, there are repairs. We may say something, stop, and trace back to change what we said. We may repair \u201csmall things\u201d like a morpheme, such as a plural marker. Here is an example from Trump: \u201c(the thing + the things) that business as in people like the most is the fact that I\u2019m cutting regulation\u201d. Note that I have annotated the repair in the form of (to-be-repaired + repair). Here Trump repaired \u201cthe thing\u201d by adding a plural ending. We may also repair big chunks. Here is another example from Trump: \u201cWe have endorsements from, I think, almost every police group, very \u2014 I mean, a large percentage of them in the United States\u201d. Here Trump first said \u201calmost every police group\u201d, and then changed it into \u201ca large percentage of them\u201d. Lastly, there are abandoned (incomplete) utterances. For example, Trump said \u201cwe have made so many bad deals during the last \u2014 so she\u2019s got experience, that I agree.\u201d. The first sentence was incomplete (\u201cthe last\u2026\u201d).<\/p>\n

So I counted all filled pauses, repetitions, repairs and abandoned utterances. Note that I didn\u2019t analyse interruptions, or disfluencies during cross talk (obviously there were a lot of repetitions and abandoned utterances from both of them during cross talk). Trump had a fair number of repetitions, repairs and abandoned utterances, and relatively few filled pauses. He often stops mid-sentence to insert extra information, called asides or parentheticals. Often they are anecdotes or comments about himself (\u201che called me the other day\u201d or \u201cI\u2019m not going to get credit for it\u201d), and he may or may not come back to his original sentence afterwards.\u00a0Clinton, on the other hand, had almost no repairs or abandoned utterances, a few repetitions, and many more filled pauses. Overall, Trump had 67 disfluencies while Clinton had 53. Mind you, I haven\u2019t counted the total number of words (and I suspect Trump said more). So their overall rates of disfluencies may be the same.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

So here is your impression confirmed. Trump tends to repeat himself, he often stops mid-sentence to add something, and may or may not come back to his original partial sentence. He also often changes his mind about what he said (repairs). This is why he doesn\u2019t come across as a well-prepared and eloquent speaker. Below are some examples:<\/p>\n

Repetition:<\/p>\n

TRUMP: New York \u2014 New York has done an excellent job. And I give credit \u2014 I give credit across the board going back two mayors.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Repetition with inserted asides:<\/p>\n

TRUMP: And Sean Hannity said \u2014 and he called me the other day \u2014 and I spoke to him about it \u2014 he said you were totally against the war, because he was for the war.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Repair:<\/p>\n

TRUMP: They (left + fired ) 1,400 people.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

TRUMP: I could name + { I mean} there are thousands of them.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Abandoned utterance:<\/p>\n

TRUMP: <\/em>The African-American community \u2014 because \u2014 look, the community within the inner cities has been so badly treated.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

TRUMP: whether it\u2019s \u2014 I mean, I can just keep naming them all day long \u2014 we need law and order in our country.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Clinton, on the other hand, speaks more slowly, and she uses more filled pauses than Trump. The filled pauses, however, are not evenly distributed. There are long stretches of speech without a single filled pause, but there are pockets of utterances where filled pauses are frequent. One example was her discussion about cyber crime. Here is one paragraph from her, fillers are annotated like { F uh}.<\/p>\n

CLINTON: Well, I think we need to do much more {F uh}<\/strong> with our tech companies to {F uh}<\/strong> prevent ISIS and their operatives {F uh}<\/strong> from being able to use the Internet to radicalize, even direct {F uh}<\/strong> people in our country and Europe and elsewhere. But we also have to intensify our air strikes against ISIS {F uh}<\/strong> and eventually support our Arab and Kurdish {F uh}<\/strong> partners to be able to actually take out ISIS {F uh}<\/strong> in Raqqa. {F uh}<\/strong> And we\u2019re hoping that {F uh}<\/strong> within the year we\u2019ll be able to push ISIS out of Iraq and then, you know, really squeeze them in Syria.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Looking at disfluency patterns over time, it shows that Trump\u2019s disfluency increases steadily over time, while Clinton\u2019s disfluency fluctuates, peaking at 60 to 75 minutes window, when they were discussing cyber crime and fighting ISIS.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

What does this disfluency difference between Trump and Clinton mean? Do repetitions \/repairs \/abandoned utterances suggest a less clear mind? a freer mind?, a mind that gets distracted by its own thoughts? Do fluctuations in rates of filled pauses indicate fluctuations in confidence? I don\u2019t know. The viewers were clearly annoyed by Trump\u2019s disfluency much more than by Clinton\u2019s. Trump style disfluency \u2013 repetitions, inserted asides, repairs and abandoned utterances \u2013 affects discourse coherence. It doesn\u2019t necessarily mean his mind is incoherent, but it IS a style that is more egocentric and less considerate. It indicates less initial planning and preparation. Clinton\u2019s disfluency, namely filled pauses, indicates the opposite: planning. She pauses in order to make the upcoming utterance clear. So Trump was just externalizing his inner (rather free and unique) trail of thoughts, but Clinton was aiming for getting the exact ideas across to us: she cared about how OUR trail of thoughts changes as a result of her speech.<\/p>\n

Now, what about smile and laughter? Were there any? Of course. One widely held impression was that Clinton had to smile a lot while waiting for Trump\u2019s nonsense. And again, the impression was confirmed! She did smile a lot, and very often for looonnnggg stretches of time!<\/p>\n

I found a total of 42 smiles and laughs of Trump and Clinton (there were also 8 audience laughs). And yes, most of them came from Clinton (74%)! The total duration of Clinton\u2019s smile\/laugh was 124 seconds, compared to Trump\u2019s total of 14 seconds (nearly 10:1). Compare to friendly conversations, while laughter happens between 10 \u2013 50 times per 10 min, this debate was a smile\/ laughter desert (at 0.5 times per 10min including smiles). In friendly conversations, there a lot of \u201cdyadic\u201d laugh, meaning when one person laughs, the other often joins in. In this debate there was only one occasion where both joined the smile\/laugh. Trump had just said a lot of bad things about Clinton\u2019s temperament. Clinton responded \u201cWhew, OK\u201d, followed by a laugh (and some shoulder wiggling). At that moment, the audience laughed and Mr Trump smiled at her. Here is a screen shot.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Very sweet huh? This was the only not-so-hostile laughter sharing moment between the two. All the other smiles and laughs communicates something hostile, or at least, non-cooperative. And of course when one does it, the other wouldn\u2019t join. The most frequent \u201cmeaning\u201d of smiles and laughs in this debate can be paragraphed as \u201cridiculous\u201d. It is often when one person had said something about the other (often Trump was the speaker), and the other smiles to say \u201cRIDICULOUS\u201d.<\/p>\n

Both Trump and Clinton used smiles and laughs in this way, but they look<\/em> very different. Trump never showed his teeth. Very often he just lifted the corners of his mouth, and there was nothing around his eyes, which makes his smiles look \u201cdisingenuous\u201d. Sometimes his smiles were accompanied with eye rolling or head shaking. Compared to Clinton, Trump\u2019s smiles were much short (on average 1.5 seconds). Here are some of his signature smiles:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Trump smiling to Clinton\u2019s \u201che owes about $650 million to Wall Street and foreign banks\u201d:<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    <\/a><\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Trump smiles to Clinton\u2019s \u201cI was so shocked that Donald publicly invited Putin to hack into Americans\u201d:<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      <\/a><\/p>\n

        \n
      1. Clinton said \u201cI have put forth a plan to defeat uh ISIS\u201d, and Trump reacted\u2026<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        <\/a><\/p>\n

        In comparison, Clinton smiled a lot, and each time for a long time. Her average smile\/laugh duration was 4.5 seconds (compared to 1.5 seconds of Trump), and the longest smile was 15 seconds long, 15 seconds long!!! That\u2019s much longer than a usual natural smile! Also, though the function of her smiles and laughs were the same as Trumps \u2013 to dismiss what Trump just said, to communicate \u201cthat\u2019s ridiculous\u201d \u2013 her smiles look<\/em> much more friendly. If I didn\u2019t give you a context, you may well think she was hosting a party, or was talking to a friendly neighbour. Look:<\/p>\n

          \n
        1. Trump said \u201cAnd you\u2019re going to stop them [ISIS]? I don\u2019t think so.\u201d, and Clinton smiled, for 10 seconds:
          \n          <\/a><\/li>\n
        2. Trump said \u201cAll of the things that she\u2019s talking about could have been taken care of during the last 10 years, let\u2019s say, while she had great power. But they weren\u2019t taken care of. And if she ever wins this race, they won\u2019t be taken care of\u201d. Clinton smiled (at least 3 seconds, as the camera moved to the host).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

          <\/a><\/p>\n

          6. Trump said \u201c$200 million is spent [by Clinton], and I\u2019m either winning or tied, and I\u2019ve spent practically nothing\u201d. Clinton smiled for 3 seconds.
          \n          <\/a><\/p>\n

           <\/p>\n

          So these were my initial observations. Trump and Clinton were disfluent in different ways. Trump tended to repeat, repair and abandon his sentences mid-air. Clinton used more filled pauses, but these filled pauses clustered in some stretches and were absent in others.<\/p>\n

          Trump didn\u2019t show a great smile: no teeth, no eyes, and not so many. Clinton, on the other hand, smiled often and she kept them long. Her smiles were so friendly-looking, one might forget that linguistically they served the same functions as Trump\u2019s bitter smirks.<\/p>\n

          I understand Trump\u2019s bitter smiles. Clinton\u2019s remarks were not friendly, why should Trump\u2019s smiles be sweet? But why did Clinton have so many sweet and long smiles, after so many harsh attacks from Trump? Ahhh maybe her smiles were for the audience. She was strategically saying to us \u201clook at how stupid Trump is, we (inclusive) are much better than him\u201d. So Trump\u2019s smiles stayed within their interaction, but Clinton\u2019s smiles reached out. Did it work? What do you think😉<\/p>\n\n

          Above is a guest post by Ye Tian<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

          A couple of days ago, in a caf\u00e9 in Paris, \u00a0someone noticed a young woman intently watching the Clinton\/Trump debate, and commented \"Isn't watching the debate so much better than working?\" But the debate watcher was Ye Tian, a postdoc at the\u00a0Laboratoire de linguistique formelle, Universit\u00e9 Paris Diderot (Paris 7), part of a project whose […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language-and-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28552"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28552\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28561,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28552\/revisions\/28561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}