Donald Trump’s rhetoric has at times been described as chilling, divisive and juvenile. This week, we are seeing the extreme effects that language can have, as the US president and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un continue to engage in an escalating dialogue. Earlier this year, the lead author of a linguistics study analysing the language of the president and eight other candidates for the 2016 presidential race, warned that Trump's win could indicate an evolution in successful political rhetoric that would be a “real risk [for] democracy”. And that's how we've arrived at Trump pledging to use "fire and fury" against one of the world's most volatile nations.
"As Trump won the primaries and the general election, does that mean that efficient communication must be based on tweet-like rhetoric and this form will dominate the future elections?" said Jacques Savoy of the University of Neuchatel in a press release. "Clearly the rhetoric evolution goes towards short messages, but [does] this also imply simplistic analysis and solutions? If the answer is affirmative, I see a real risk [for] democracy."
The study, published in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, found that Trump’s simple style avoided complex vocabulary, was more repetitive and direct than his competitors’, formed of short sentences and scarcely ever informative – in contrast with Trump's own infamous campaign assertion, "I know words, I have the best words."
After analysing the televised debates of Jeb Bush, Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Martin O'Malley, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump, the study authors found that the lexical density - the measure of how much meaning and information there is to dialogue - was lowest for Trump. In contrast, Clinton, O'Malley, and Sanders scored highly on lexical density value and used longer sentences and longer and more complex words than was average among competitors.
Trump was also - unsurprisingly - the only candidate to have the word ‘I’ as the second most commonly used word, after ‘the’. Clinton did use ‘I’ frequently as well, but the authors note this was a switchover from the more commonly used ‘we’ at the early stages of a presidential race. Once Trump and Clinton became the frontrunners, the switch to 'I' began.
The study shone a light on some of the more formulaic tropes of political speech, with the word ‘people’ among the top four most commonly used thematic words for seven out of the nine candidates. Trump and Clinton actually shared three out of four of their most commonly used words.
One of the most interesting finds of the study was delivered by simply looking at the top ten most specific terms used by each candidate. It’s immediately clear what their campaign focuses were from these. For instance, ‘Wall Street’, ‘wealth’, ‘class’ and ‘billionaire’ ranked highly for Sanders; Clinton used ‘comprehensive’, ‘Senator’, and ‘affordable’ frequently; Bush scored with ‘status’, ‘caliphate’, and ‘brother’. Trump’s words? ‘I’, ‘Mexico’, ‘very’, ‘deal’, and ‘tremendous’.
This is far from the first time a linguistic look at Trump’s oft-bizarre dialogue has been carried out - one key piece of work from Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute (LTI) found last year that the grammar used in Trump’s speeches corresponded with that of students aged 11 and under.
Trump’s language may have been sparsely populated with meaning and facts, according to the study authors. But let's not forget he is also the presidential candidate that gave us “bigly” (the adverb form of big, the internet discovered) and “braggadocious” (according to dictionary Merriam-Webster, “a dialectical word from 19th-century America” meaning arrogant). Whether purposefully, or not.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
