#  Biden-Palin Linguistics 

 





October 03, 2008

 

 

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](http://www.iq.harvard.edu/blog/sss/archives/2008/04/linguistics_of.shtml). 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).

Sort**Word****Biden****Palin****pval**also 3470.0000their32 40.0000number15 00.0002want 0160.0003united16 10.0004policy22 40.0004just 6280.0007those10340.0013too 0130.0014they41180.0015well24 70.0019these 1150.0020said40180.0022reform 0120.0023who11340.0025even 3190.0025down16 30.0034gwen16 30.0034



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](http://www.iq.harvard.edu/blog/sss/archives/2008/04/linguistics_of.shtml); her favorite conjunctions are "and that's" and "and i."
  

Sort**Word****Biden****Palin****pval**the united16 10.0004united states16 10.0004we have 9340.0007want to 0140.0009he said11 00.0016have got 0120.0023and i 6250.0025that is 4210.0026and that's 1140.0032middle class12 10.0035



Posted by [Kevin Bartz](http://www.iq.harvard.edu/blog/sss/archives/author/kevin-bartz-1/) at October 3, 2008 11:38 AM



 

 

 



 

 

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