Biden-Palin Linguistics

This post looks at the linguistics of last night's Biden-Palin debate. Palin used the word "reform" 12 times compared to Biden's none. Biden used "middle class" 12 times to Palin's one.

Here's a sequel to my earlier Obama-Clinton post. Overall,

Overall, Biden uttered 7,065 words and Palin 7,646, with a total of 2,117 unique words. Which words did Biden use significantly more or less than Palin? For each word, we apply a chi-squared test that the candidates spoke the word with equal probability. Finally, we sort the list by p-value, highlighting the differences. I've eliminated words that appear over 50 times (mostly stop words like "the," which Palin evidently used a couple hundred times more than Biden).

Observations:

• Look at all the connectors in the Palin column: "also," "just," "too." She uses these words to string together her thoughts.


• Biden's favored conjunctions are "number" -- from his several "number one, number two" formulations -- and "well."


• Two interesting ones are "policy" (Biden 22, Palin 4) and "reform" (Palin 12, Biden 0). These were certainly buzzwords from debate prep.

We can also look at bigrams, pairs of words, in a similar way.

• Biden used "United States" 16 times as opposed to Palin's 1.


• Like McCain, Palin only once used the term "middle class," compared to Biden's 12. To be fair, she made several allusions to the middle class without mentioning the word.
  
• Here's an interesting observation: Palin shares many of Obama's constructions; her favorite conjunctions are "and that's" and "and i."

Posted by Kevin Bartz at October 3, 2008 11:38 AM