LING001 -- Homework 6a

(Due Wed. 11/5/2014)

Apply any two of the five types of analysis listed below to (at least) two political speeches, by two different politicians.

Whatever analyses you do, try to use them to draw some conclusions about the politicians and their personalities, ideas, and rhetorical self-presentation.

You're free to choose any politicians, from any country, speaking in any language. Some perhaps-useful links are given below:

This site has links to many sources of (mostly historical) political speeches.

For recent speeches by President Obama, see the "Photos & Video" section at whitehouse.gov, which has .mp3 audio and transcripts as well as streaming and downloadable video.

GOP.gov has links to videos of many addresses, interviews and press conferences by Republica politicians, though generally without transcripts. Links to videos of the recent Republican presidential debates can be found here (again generally without transcripts).

C-SPAN.org has links to video of many political speeches, events, and discussions of all kinds.

You can find links to transcripts and video or audio recordings in the Wikipedia pages for the "Republican presidential debates, 2008" and the "Democratic presidential debates, 2008".

You can find video, audio and transcripts for UK parliamentary activities here and here.

And you can often find audio, video, and/or transcripts of political events by doing web searches of more specific kinds, like {Rick Perry transcript mp3}.

Depending on the kind of analysis you're doing, and the depth of your interest, you may want to make use of the text, audio and/or video of more than one speech by each of the politicians you choose.

1. Use of metaphorical language. Try to relate a number of particular examples to a larger metaphorical scheme, perhaps in the general style discussed here and here.

2. Sentence length and depth of syntactic embedding. See here and here for some sample analyses in this style.

3. Use of disfluencies (filled pauses such as um and uh, or notable silent pauses; repetitions such as "I see no reason to believe we're headed for -- (pause) -- for economic downturn"; self-corrections such as "I mean, the free market is our -- one of our greatest assets"). At what rate do disfluencies occur? What is the effect on the candidate's message?

4. The dimensions of James Pennebaker's "LIWC" analysis. (Since this has not been covered in class, if you choose this option, you'll need to read at least the basic online description, and perhaps some of the papers written about it. Note that a free online version is available -- we are not asking you to buy the program.)

5. You can use free pre-packaged software like TextSTAT to do some word- or phrase-frequency calculations of your own, whose results you think are interesting. If you're a little more ambitious, and especially if you have some programming background, you might try NLTK. (As one trivial example, comparing the Oct. 9, 2007 Republican debate to the Sept. 26, 2007 Democratic debate, the Republicans used the word "no" at an overall rate of about 2.25 per thousand words, whereas the Democratic "no" rate was about 3.63 per thousand words.)

[Note that the on-line transcripts generally do not reproduce disfluencies accurately, so if you choose to do analysis type 3, you should correct the transcripts by reference to the recordings.]

Feel free to improvise on these general ideas, as long as the results are a) reasonably objective, factually correct, and well documented, and b) interesting.