By now, many of us have heard President Donald Trump speeches, or at least snippets of them. One thing I have noticed, among many other things, is that he tends to use a lot adjectives and adverbs or at least I always get the notion that they are many. Most likely, it could be just that it’s the same short adjectives and adverbs that are repeated over and over and thus sounds like he uses them a lot, for example in the following phrases; “…build a very huge wall”; “It’s going to be really great“; “so sad, tremendously sad, greatest sadness ever.”
Since the overuse of adjectives and adverbs can be seen as embellishing and can clutter sentences pointlessly, especially in formal speeches, I was curious about how Trump actually uses adjectives and adverbs in comparison to for instance the former president Obama, whose speeches have been said to be more eloquent.
To investigate, I compared transcripts of the inauguration speeches by Trump (2017) and by Obama (2009, 2013), and their first news press conference as president elect (Trump in 2017 and Obama in 2008). The press conference speeches included the president elects’ answers to posed questions by reporters. Table below summarizes the number of words in each speech. From the table, we can observe that there was a greater range in the number of words used by Trump in his first news press conference and inauguration speech, while Obama’s three speeches are relatively about the same in the number of words.
Table: Total number of words in presidential inauguration speeches.
For the analysis of the adjectives and adverbs, I made use of TreeTagger. TreeTagger is a tool for annotating text with part-of-speech tags. Part-of-speech (POS) tagging is the process of marking up words in a text with their part of speech, e.g., noun, verb, adjective, adverb, etc. After performing the part-of-speech tagging, I retrieved for each speech, only the word-POS pairs, where the POS tag was an adjective or adverb. From the retrieved list, I performed a comparative analysis of the usage of the adjectives and adverbs between Trump and Obama in their inauguration speeches (A) and in their first news press conference as president elect (B).
A. Inauguration speeches
The figures below show the distribution of adjectives and adverbs in each inauguration speech, as a percentage of the total words in the speech. From the figures, we can see that there is a higher use of adjectives and adverbs in Trump’s inauguration speech than in both Obama’s 09 and 13 speeches. Interestingly from the figures, we can see that Obama’s use of adjectives and adverbs has relatively been the same across both of his speeches.
From the results alone, it is difficult to judge whether they indicate an under, normal or over-usage of adjectives and adverbs. Thus, to get some indication, I included in the figures a LIWC mean score for both the adjectives and adverbs. The LIWC mean score was obtained from the popular Linguistic Inquirer Word Count (LIWC) text analysis tool. The tool includes a dictionary of words built from analyzing over 100,00 files of text , representing over 250 million words. In building the dictionary, it was identified that on average, adjectives constituted 4.49% of the total words and adverbs 5.27%. Thus, from the figures we can observe that while both Trump and Obama used significantly a higher number of adjectives than the LIWC mean, with adverbs, Obama is around the average, while Trump is visibly above.
Unfortunately, since majority of the text files used in developing the LIWC tool were not political type of speeches, a bigger comparison with other speeches to identify what is ‘average’ in the political context and where Trump’s speeches fall, would need to be conducted.
Exactly which adjectives and adverbs does Trump uses, was the focus of my next analysis. Figure below reveals the top 20 adjectives and adverbs that were most frequently us by Trump in his inauguration speech. Using those same 20 words, I identified how frequently they appeared in Obama’s speeches. The results are also shown in the figure.
From the figure, we can see Trump’s speech had high usage of the words “Americans,” “again,” “back,” and “great.” This is reflective of his inauguration speech, which was America-centric and was focused on making America great again and bringing things back to Americans.
Surprisingly one of the most frequent term in the three inauguration speeches is the adverb “not”, with Obama using it more often in his speeches than Trump. For example, it was used in Obama’s 13 speech in the following phrases: “our journey is ‘not’ complete until our wives…”; “‘not’ complete until our gay brothers…”; “‘not’ complete until no citizen…”
The adverbs “new” and “now” were also emphasized in all the inauguration speeches, perhaps indicating the presidents’ desires to bring in new things now or bring in change as presidents.
B. News press conference speeches
Moving a bit back in time from the inauguration speeches to the then president elects’ first news press conference, I analyzed how they used adjectives and adverbs. The analysis revealed that in his press conference, Trump used 5,95% adjectives while Obama used 6,97% and Trump used 7,79% adverbs while Obama used 5,61%.
In addition, I also looked at the top ten most frequent adjectives and adverbs. These are shown in the figures below.
From the figures, we can see the different usage of adjectives and adverbs. In particular, the adverb “very” is used significantly more by Trump than Obama. It was used by Trump in phrases such as “I am going to work very hard”; “I’m very proud..”; ” I look very much forward”; “… going to have a very, very elegant day.” From the press conference results, we can also see that there is a difference in the length of adjectives and adverbs used. Specifically, the average length of the adjectives and adverbs used by Trump is 4 characters while for Obama it is 5,8 characters.
In summary, this analysis has mostly served to reveal the actual usage of adjectives and adverbs in Trump’s speeches. It is interesting to see for instance the change in the top adjectives and adverbs used by Trump from the press conference to the inauguration speech. Notably, the adverb “very” was used significantly less in the inauguration speech. In addition, we can see that from all the speeches analyzed, there was a tendency for Trump to use more adverbs than adjectives when compared to Obama. However, due to the small sample of speeches analyzed, it is not possible to make any conclusive deductions. Further studies will need to be conducted.
Sources:
Trump’s 2017 inauguration transcript – https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/01/20/donald-trumps-full-inauguration-speech-transcript-annotated/?utm_term=.7c244dd73119
Trump’s 2017 news press conference transcript – https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/us/politics/trump-press-conference-transcript.html?_r=0
Obama’s 2013 inauguration transcript – https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/21/barack-obama-2013-inaugural-address
Obama’s 2009 inauguration transcript – http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Inauguration/president-obama-inauguration-speech-transcript/story?id=6689022
Obama’s 2008 news press conference transcript – http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/24/AR2009032403036.html
Also published on Medium.