Political vocabulary display
Language Log 2015-09-10
In a comment on "The most Trumpish (and Bushish) words", D.O. wrote "It seems that we are missing (at least I was missing) a key piece about Mr. Trump's and Mr. Bush's speaking style. Mr. Bush is using significantly more words than Mr. Trump". A traditional way to look things of this kind uses a plot of word type count against word token count. And a type-token plot suggests that Mr. Bush's rate of vocabulary display is indeed greater than Mr. Trumps's:
The specific recipe for this plot strung together the following texts:
Trump-
His announcement His side of a press conference held on 8/11/2015 His side of a press conference held on 9/3/2015 His remarks from the first Republican candidate debate
Bush-
His announcement His side of Face The Nation 5/31/2015 His side of an interview with Sean Hannity 6/16/2015 A speech he gave on 8/11/2015 His remarks from the first Republican candidate debate
One factor to consider is that Trump's "texts" are all extemporized, while two of Bush's texts (his announcement and the 8/11/2015 speech) were delivered from a written version. Still, I suspect that even if we limited considered to transcripts of extemporized speech, there would be a (smaller) difference of the cited kind.
Some relevant past posts:
"Word counts", 11/28/2006 "Britain's scientists risk becoming hypocritical laughing-stocks, research suggests", 12/16/2006 "Cultural specificity and universal values", 12/22/2006 "Vicky Pollard's Revenge", 1/2/2007 "Ask Language Log: Comparing the vocabularies of different languages", 3/31/2008 "Betting on the poor boy: Whorf strikes back", 4/5/2009 "Nick Clegg and the Word Gap", 10/16/2010 "Lexical bling: Vocabulary display and social status", 11/20/2014