As a linguist, writer, and professor who primarily teaches sociolinguistics (how language functions within society), I’ve always been fascinated by the tendency for people to use language in patterns. The recent Harris vs. Trump debate gave me an opportunity to examine how these candidates use language to appeal to voters.
Seeing which approach a candidate chooses can reveal deeper truths about them. Traditionally, the study of rhetoric and language shows that politicians can appeal to reason, emotion, authority, or a combination of these to persuade their audiences. Emotionally, both fear and hope are effective in motivating voters. There’s no right or wrong way.
Linguists have developed the concept of an idiolect, an individual dialect that is like a fingerprint, different for each individual and created from our unique linguistic and social experiences.
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I often prepare and rehearse for public speaking events. But when you actually confront your audience, they tend to revert to stupidity, which is intuitive and already second nature. For example, speakers don’t think about the length of their sentences. They think about the ideas they want to express. They may not be aware that there are patterns in the way they speak or speak, or that they repeat the same words over and over again.
negativity
I prompted the artificial intelligence tool to answer questions about word frequency, sentence length, and word types in discussions. All AI tool outputs were manually checked to ensure that there were no discrepancies.
What I was looking for is: The way candidates use language in debates reflects their different approaches to campaigning, particularly in terms of past or present orientation, appeals to fear or hope, and negative or positive statements. I expected there to be.
It turns out that’s the case.
First, we selected six segments of the discussion transcript. Each segment is the same length and features both candidates answering the same or at least similar questions.
Then I noticed the negativity in their language. I expected more negative statements to be more closely aligned with appeals to the politics of fear, and more positive statements to be more closely associated with the politics of hope. If a candidate is appealing to fear, they will likely focus on what could or may not have gone wrong. In contrast, when you focus on hope, you are more likely to focus on what might go well in the future.
It turns out that Mr. Trump consistently makes more negative statements than Ms. Harris. This was true for each of the six segments separately, with percentages varying from over 33% to over 166%.
For example, President Trump used negative statements and words such as “totally destroy” and “disaster” 12 times during the 30-second segment. During her 30-second response, Harris used negative comments or language just seven times.
The intent of the words was also different, with President Trump’s negative words tending to be stronger, such as “violent,” “very frightening,” and “ridiculous.” Overall, Trump averaged about 61% more negative comments than Harris in every segment I analyzed.
short sentences
Next, I looked at the length of the sentences. We reasoned that shorter sentences tended to convey a sense of urgency that more closely aligned with fear, while longer sentences were more fluid and calmer and thus could be more associated with hope. We examined three segments from the original set of six.
Intuitively, people might think that short statements reflect directness and tackling the issue head-on, but that’s not necessarily the case. For example, one of President Trump’s relatively brief statements, “The agreement said they had to do this, this, this, this, this, and they didn’t do it.” , may be considered evasive because it does not include a level of specificity. That way, listeners will be able to assess for themselves whether something has been accomplished. Still, it’s simple and short, and just repeating “this” makes it a little longer.
In the first segment I analyzed, Trump’s average sentence length was 13 words, compared to 17 words for Harris. The gap widened in the second segment, where Trump’s average sentence length was 14 words compared to Harris’ 25. The pattern was the same in the third segment.
story of the future
Finally, I looked at how they talked about the future and the past, and whether they talked about one or the other more as an indicator of a possible increased reliance on fear and hope. I looked into it.
Typically, in the context of fear, the recent past is used as a time to escape and the more distant past is used as a time to return to. In contrast, people who focus on hope look to the future.
Candidates will give their closing arguments at debut.youtu.be.
An analysis of their concluding remarks reveals that both candidates mention the past the same number of times, but in very different ways. Most of Harris’ references to the past were about the fact that President Trump often focuses on the past. For example, she said there were “attempts to turn us back” and continued: “We will not go back.”
Meanwhile, Trump spoke further about perceived failures of his adversaries in the past, including that he “had only 3.5 seconds to fix the border.” He also talked about what he recognized as past accomplishments, such as “I rebuilt the entire military.”
As for future statements, all four of Mr. Trump’s statements were about what would happen if his opponent wins — for example, “If she wins the election, fracking in Pennsylvania.” will end on the first day,” etc.
Harris made nine statements about her “future,” all of which were about what she plans to do. For example, she said: “And if I become president, I will understand the value that I bring that access to health care should be a right, not just a privilege for those who can afford it, and make it available to all people.” I’m going to do it.”
Mr. Harris also summarized both the discussion and my findings in his closing statement:
“Tonight, you heard two very different visions for our country, one focused on the future and one focused on the past, and one that seeks to set us back. Attempt. But we won’t go back.”
The outcome of the election will determine whether American voters are drawn to fear or hope at this point. The coming weeks will certainly provide a large amount of data for linguistic analysis.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
