Is the dumbing down of vernacular proof that our societies are getting dumber?
>To study the evolution of the rhetoric and language style of the American presidents from 1789 to 2017, we have analyzed all the annual State of the Union (SOTU) and inaugural addresses. Those speeches present the intentions and indicate the legislative priorities of the Chief of the Executive. Based on this relatively fixed form, this analysis corroborates several studies and emphasizes new trends and methods. With the years, the mean sentence length becomes shorter to facilitate comprehension by a larger audience. To further improve this goal, the vocabulary becomes less complex, and the percentage of big words decreases, indicating a preference for common words or expressions. The rhetoric evolves towards a more assertive and intimate tone with an increase in the occurrence of pronouns, particularly with the lemma we. Based on automatic classification techniques, we also observe that every president after 1961 generally has a clean and distinct style. When inspecting all presidents, some figures show a distinct break with their predecessors such as Lincoln, T. Roosevelt, Wilson, F.D. Roosevelt, or Kennedy. A closer analysis of presidencies since 1961 reveals that, with time, governmental speeches include more words related to humans and emotional terms, as well as references to God and symbolic expressions (America, country, freedom).
Savoy, Jacques. (2017). Analysis of the Style and the Rhetoric of the American Presidents Over Two Centuries. Glottometrics. 38.
>To study the evolution of the rhetoric and language style of the American presidents from 1789 to 2017, we have analyzed all the annual State of the Union (SOTU) and inaugural addresses. Those speeches present the intentions and indicate the legislative priorities of the Chief of the Executive. Based on this relatively fixed form, this analysis corroborates several studies and emphasizes new trends and methods. With the years, the mean sentence length becomes shorter to facilitate comprehension by a larger audience. To further improve this goal, the vocabulary becomes less complex, and the percentage of big words decreases, indicating a preference for common words or expressions. The rhetoric evolves towards a more assertive and intimate tone with an increase in the occurrence of pronouns, particularly with the lemma we. Based on automatic classification techniques, we also observe that every president after 1961 generally has a clean and distinct style. When inspecting all presidents, some figures show a distinct break with their predecessors such as Lincoln, T. Roosevelt, Wilson, F.D. Roosevelt, or Kennedy. A closer analysis of presidencies since 1961 reveals that, with time, governmental speeches include more words related to humans and emotional terms, as well as references to God and symbolic expressions (America, country, freedom).
Savoy, Jacques. (2017). Analysis of the Style and the Rhetoric of the American Presidents Over Two Centuries. Glottometrics. 38.
