#  Linguistics of the Debate 

 





April 18, 2008

 

 

In last week's debate in Philadelphia,

- Clinton's favorite phrase was "You know," which she used 49 times to Obama's 18
- Obama's favorite phrase was "American people," which he used 16 times to Clinton's 1
- Obama was the only one to use the words "politics" (10 times), "economic" (9 times) and "election" (9 times).

Last week's debate provides a small but interesting corpus to analyze the candidates' favorite linguistic formulations. Overall,

- 12,329 words were uttered by a candidate
- Obama uttered 6,206 words (1,331 unique) in 40 chunks
- Clinton uttered 6,123 words (1,250 unique) in 37 chunks

So all in all, the candidates spoke about the same number of words. But which words? We can test that using a basic corpus comparison method. In all, there were 1,971 unique words. For each of these, we test the hypothesis that the candidates spoke the word with equal probability, using a simple chi-squared test. Next we sort all words by their p-values so that the most differentially expressed words percolate to the top. Here are the top 20 words by p-value, along with their frequencies from Obama and Clinton.

SortWordobamaclintonpvalwill 18 560.0000know 23 640.0000that's 43 120.0001she 16 00.0002it 41 790.0005how 36 120.0010clinton 14 10.0021i1502050.0024he 5 210.0029politics 10 00.0047this 58 300.0047american 20 50.0056to2112680.0058begin 0 90.0072york 0 90.0072decade 9 00.0081economic 9 00.0081election 9 00.0081going 49 260.0128give 1 100.0149



Sometimes control words (I, it, etc.) are excluded from analysis, but here I thought it would be fun to leave them in so we could see each candidate's preferred constructions. Besides the points listed above, here are a few interesting notes:  
\- Clinton used the word "I" 205 times to Obama's 150  
\- Obama loves to start sentences with "That's:" "That's why I'm...", "That's what we're," etc.  
\- Obama loves the word "decade" -- evidently he used the phrase "decades after decades" several times

Of course, unigrams -- single words -- can only tell you so much. If we do the same analysis using bigrams, a few more bits of information drip out:

SortWordobamaclintonpvalyou know18490.0002american people16 10.0008senator clinton13 00.0009the american17 20.0014and that's13 10.0035have a 5200.0046this country10 00.0047i will 7230.0055going to46220.0061new york 0 90.0072



So Clinton always punctuates her thoughts with "you know," while Obama attributes his goals to the "American people."

It will be interesting when McCain gets into the mix with one of these two. I think it would be fun to construct a *language model* -- a model for the probability that each candidate spoke a certain sentence. Given the differences, I bet that given a sentence, it could easily figure out whether Obama, Clinton or McCain said it!

Posted by [Kevin Bartz](http://www.iq.harvard.edu/blog/sss/archives/author/kevin-bartz-1/) at April 18, 2008 12:44 PM



 

 

 



 

 

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