As the US Presidential campaign entered its final few weeks, language researcher Andrew Moffat took a look at the language used by Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in the first 2 televised US Presidential debates.
Using a bespoke corpus built from transcripts of the broadcasts, I took a look at the content and style of each of the candidates’ speech, and suggest what themes we might see in the final debate.
What did they talk about?
We can see which concepts were most important to the candidates by analyzing what the keywords were in their speech. The word clouds below show the two-word expressions most ‘key’ to each candidate in each debate.
You can see the difference in the ‘keyness’ of notable concepts from the first to the second debate. Terms like Donald Trump, never apologized, a disaster, and bad judgement reflect the acrimonious nature of the second debate compared to the first. Listen out to hear if Clinton and Trump continue the trend of focusing on ‘personal’ terms in Wednesday night’s final debate.
How much did they speak?
Overall Trump spoke more than Clinton in both debates – though to a slightly lesser extent in the second one. Look out for Clinton trying to increase her share of the talking on Wednesday night.
Vocabulary
The Debate Corpus showed that Clinton uses a broader vocabulary than Trump. She used 868 different words 3 times or fewer, compared to Trump’s 682. On top of this, Clinton’s words are, on average, less frequent than Trump’s when compared to our general English corpus. To put that a different way, Trump uses fewer, simpler words! See if you can pick up the frequency of repetition in this week’s debate.
Us and Them
The candidates’ use of first person pronouns across both debates shows a broad agreement with their share of words in the Debate Corpus, with just two exceptions – ‘us’ and ‘me’. ‘Us’ is used significantly more by Clinton, and ‘me’ is used significantly more by Trump. The latter is partly due to the use of rhetorical devices such as ‘believe me’ and ‘let me tell you’, but he often also appears as the object in his sentences, with positive examples such as ‘endorsed me’ and ‘chose me’ and negative examples include hitting me and tarnish me. Clinton’s use of ‘us’ is used to create a bond between her and her audience. Listen out in Wednesday night’s debate to see if this trend continues.
Interruptions
Trump was accused of frequently interrupting Clinton during the first debate, and this is confirmed by the corpus. 31 of Clinton’s paragraphs finish in ellipsis (…), showing an incomplete sentence. All of these except 2 are followed by Trump speaking. By comparison, Trump has 15 incomplete paragraphs, and of these only 4 are followed by Clinton (the others are followed by the moderator Lester Holt). This was similar in the second debate, though less pronounced, possibly partly due to the Town Hall format of the debate. Look out to see if Clinton tries to match Trump and interrupt him more aggressively in the final round.