Quantitative Analysis of US Presidential Inaugural Addresses (original) (raw)

The research aims to investigate several features of inaugural addresses of the presidents of the United States. The goal of the paper is to observe the presidential speeches from a viewpoint of stylometry indices and to discover whether political and historical circumstances (wars, financial crisis, ideology, etc.) influence the style of inaugural addresses, analogically to findings presented by Čech (2014). Specifically, vocabulary richness, thematic concentration and text activity are computed. These three indices were chosen especially due to (a) their high efficiency of automatic text classification (genre analysis, authorship attribution, etc.), (b) their independence on text length and (c) simple linguistic interpretation. The combination of the three methods allows both to investigate the style of the particular presidential speeches in powerful linguistically comprehensive view and to observe the development trends of the specific genre of inaugural addresses during the more than 200 years long history. The corpus comprises inaugural addresses of all US presidents from George Washington to Barack Obama (57 texts in total).