A lexical analysis of the State of the Union 2007

Ingezonden door LVB op 2007-01-24 02:45

In a few minutes, president Bush will start his State of the Union speech. Matt Drudge has broken the embargo and published the whole speech on his site. I have put the text throught the Textalyser, which gave me these top ten words (after filtering stopwords):

  1. America (23)
  2. must (18)
  3. people (17)
  4. help (17)
  5. Iraq (16)
  6. government (15)
  7. insurance (14)
  8. terrorists (14)
  9. health (14)
  10. country (14)
The lexical density is 48%, the Gunning-Fog index is 9, the average number of syllables per word is 1.68 and the average number of words per sentence is 16.83. Just to compare: when George W Bush held a speech in Brussels in 2005, the Gunning-Fog index was 10.30 (which means: a lot harder to understand) and the average number of words per sentence was 17.58.

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Reacties

#38972

nicolas Raemdonck

donderdag, 19 april, 2007 - 16:53

 

This morning there was an interview on national radio with a French professor who does the same thing. He counts specific words in speeches of French candidates for presidents and so he found out that in the eighties Mitterand always used the word immigré and Chirac immigration, meaning that Mitterand defended the person and Chirac warned us for a mass movement of persons.

#36786

bushbasher

dinsdag, 13 maart, 2007 - 01:05

 

Maybe there is a coded message in there! I just composed the following sentece by using the top ten words in the correct order they are ranked, adding only some pronouns and articles for the purpose of making it grammatically correct.

"America must help [the] people [of] Iraq [and the] government [of this] country [to provide] terrorists [a] health insurance".

#35129

traveller

dinsdag, 30 januari, 2007 - 20:22

 

@ luc

Do you have a comparable Clinton, Nixon, Reagan state of the union speech. Even more interesting. FDR, yes please.

#34939

Joe

vrijdag, 26 januari, 2007 - 09:25

 

can anybody tell me what is interesting about this analysis, and how can I then convince my kids of all this?