Analysing American Political Discourse - A Text Complexity Perspective

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INTRODUCTION 
The purpose of this dissertation is a precise analysis of American political 
speeches belonging to the last four Presidents of the United States of America. 
American political discourses in the twenty-first century are perhaps more frequently 
analyzed than any other body of language in modern American English. The growing 
popularity and use of the major news media and globalization, the increase flow of 
information, in addition to the spread of wars and terrorism, are the main causes of 
great changes in language and speeches. Concerning the flow of information and 
communication between political institutions and citizens, the Internet provides 
unprecedented access to reports, transcripts and videos. However, public average 
response to this kind of media stimulation is focused on the meaningful content more 
than the linguistic form of expression. On the contrary, it is a great volume of 
information to be conveyed through the semantic, syntactic, morphological and 
phonetic level. Through the investigation of a corpus of political speeches, divided by 
subgenres, this study will identify the emerging characteristics in such planned 
language and what it differs from other linguistic genres, with special attention to the 
complexity framework. We will try to determine whether there are peculiarities inside 
the Republican speeches as opposed to the Democratic ones and what strategies are 
repeatedly used by both. 
The first chapter aims to highlight the strong connection between language and 
politics. This is not a new field of study at all, but it has fascinated ancient 
philosophers up to modernity. The controversial aspect of political language is its
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intent of persuasion that could easily be converted into manipulation. The differences 
between a legitimate form of persuasion and a deliberate intent of manipulation 
through specific forms of cognition, language, and social framework (Van Dijk, 2008)  
is absolutely subtle and difficult to detect. 
In the second chapter, we delimit our area of study to United States politics, 
outlining the structure of its political and election system, and remarking goals, roles 
and ideologies of this country. Here a picture emerges of a bipartisan democracy, with 
some constitutional documents reflecting this asset. 
Some pragmatic theories have been the pillars of our linguistic analysis of 
political transcripts, helping us to examine in depth the recurrent strategies of this 
textual typology, with a special attention to the issue of complexity evaluation, within 
the framework elaborated by Lavinia Merlini Barbaresi (2003). In the third chapter, we 
introduce the definition of text, Speech Act theory (Austin, 1962), its enforcement to 
political speech analysis, and the Co-operative principle with its maxims (Grice, 
1975).  
Chapter four gets to the heart of the matter where our investigation is 
concerned, namely the punctual commentary of different categories of political 
speeches. Although the general purpose of political discourses can be identified as 
persuasion and legitimization of specific policies, some peculiarities within subgroups 
of this genre can be traced. The first partitioning is between monological and 
dialogical discourses: the former category has been examined in the form of 
presidential debates, with three examples. The first one is taken from the 1992 
Presidential Debate in Michigan, during the election campaign that had three major 
candidates: incumbent Republican President George H. W. Bush, Democratic 
Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, and independent Texas businessman Ross Perot.  Bill 
Clinton won the election to be the 42
nd
 President of the United States by a wide 
margin. The debate began at 7 p.m. in Wharton Center for the Performing Arts at 
Michigan State University. After a general contextual description, we examined in 
detail four abstracts of Clinton‘s intervention and the respective Bush‘s responses, 
within the complexity framework, observing other textual phenomena concerning the
Introduction                                                      | 3 
 
macro and the micro-level of language, speech acts, manipulative and persuasive 
strategies. 
The second example is taken from the third and final debate at Arizona State 
University on October 13, 2004, during the Election Campaign in which Republican 
Party candidate and incumbent President George W. Bush defeated Democratic Party 
candidate John Kerry, the then junior U.S. Senator from Massachusetts. The debate 
began at 6 p.m. in Gammage Auditorium at Arizona State University. After a brief 
resume of the contents and the historical context, we considered one of the Bush‘s 
most representative interventions for a more detailed examination. Thirdly, the 
analysis focused on three Obama‘s excerpts taken from the first presidential debate, 
which took place at the University of Mississippi, during the United States presidential 
election of 2008, the 56
th
 quadrennial Presidential Election. Democrat Barack Obama, 
then junior United States Senator from Illinois, defeated Republican John McCain. 
The debate was formatted into nine nine-minute segments, and the moderator, Jim 
Lehrer, introduced the topics. At the end of paragraph 4.1.3., we propose a table (Table 
4.1) resuming the main strategies, linguistic characteristics, standards of textuality and 
topics founds in the excerpts examined, comparing differences and similarities 
between the four Presidents‘ linguistic choices.  
The investigation goes on with the presidential monologues, subdivided into 
Inaugural Addresses, State of The Union Messages, and slogans, all discourses of 
extreme effect for American culture. Chronologically ordered, we departed from 
George H. Bush Inaugural Address. All Presidents spoke at 12:05 p.m. at the West 
Front of the Capitol. Bush‘s address (2,283 words) was broadcast live on radio and 
television. As for complexity analysis, we considered an excerpt taken from the first 
section of the speech.  
The first inauguration of Bill Clinton as the 42
nd
 President of the United States 
took place on January 20, 1993. The inauguration marked the beginning of the first 
four-year term of Bill Clinton as President. We discussed three abstracts of the 
Inaugural Speech (1,580 words), the first taken from the first section and the other two 
from the closing part of the speech.
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The first inauguration of George W. Bush as the 43
rd
 President of the United 
States took place on January 20, 2001. The first excerpt of the speech (length of the 
whole text: 1,571 words) is chosen to exemplify the prominence of religious frame as 
a linguistic characteristic of President George W. Bush, then a central paragraph and 
the closing formula are proposed. Barack Obama presidential Inauguration in 2009 
accounted a larger than usual celebrity attendance beyond the largest television 
audience since Ronald Reagan in 1981 (Deseret News Archives, 2009) and a record 
number of video streams in the Internet traffic. Obama‘s Address accounted 2,404 
words taking 21 minutes. Our linguistic analysis centred in two excerpts taken from 
the closing section of the speech. Table 4.2 compares the four Presidents‘ speeches.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
Paragraph 4.2.2, dealing with the State of the Union Messages, is similarly 
structured: after describing some general characteristics of this subgenre of political 
discourse, we consider four examples of State of the Union messages. The first one is 
Bush‘s 1992, which lasted 51 minutes and consisted of 5,012 words. The President 
spoke at 9:07 p.m. in the House Chamber of the Capitol. The address was broadcast 
live on nationwide radio and television (Woolley and Peters, 1999-2011). After a 
discussion about the main issues the President dealt with, our linguistic commentary 
focused on two passages, one belonging to the first section about foreign policy, and 
the other to the closing statements.  
Clinton‘s 2000 State of the Union message was the longest in recorded history 
at 1:29 and 7452 words. The passages analysed in detail are two, one from the first 
section about the general representation of America improvement in the last year, and 
the other belonging to the closing section.  
George W. Bush‘s 2006 State of the Union lasted 51 minutes (5323 words), the 
same as the previous year's address and Nielsen Media Research
1
 reported that more 
than 41 million viewers watched the speech, three million more than the previous year. 
We commented two passages. One belongs to the first long section about foreign 
policy, a crucial issue during the current time, and the second to the usual closing 
                                              
1
 Nielsen ratings are audience measurement systems developed by Nielsen Media Research (NMR), aiming to 
determine the audience size and composition of television programming in the United States.
Introduction                                                      | 5 
 
formulas.  
Obama's first State of the Union Address in 2010 lasted 1:09 (7304 words). The 
President spoke at 9:11 p.m. in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol. The Office of 
the Press Secretary also released a Spanish language transcript of this address. Our 
analytic commentary dealt with a passage from the introductive section and another 
one from the concluding fragment, manifesting an exclusive ring structure. At the end 
of the paragraph, Table 4. 3 resumes and compares the data found in the fragments 
analyzed. 
The last subgroup of political texts is slogans, representing a peculiar form of 
texts, with some specific strategies, but sharing the same main goal of the political 
texts seen before. A roundup of the most renowned ads and mottos of each presidency 
is proposed, with a piece of contextual and historical information and a linguistic 
analysis. Due to their peculiar brevity and compared to the other textual typologies, we 
focused more on some parameters (intertextuality, effectiveness) instead of other (i.e. 
topic selection). Table 4.4 illustrates in sum the main features of the slogans studied. 
In chapter five a concluding discussion follows, structured in three points: in the 
first one, the data brought out from the punctual analysis and are summarized to 
evaluate differences and similarities of the structural properties within every subgenre 
identified from a macro-level perspective Secondly, a list of the main linguistic 
strategies found has been remarked, with some little differences in the frequency of 
use. Finally, we discuss the level of complexity as emerged from the corpus we have 
taken into account, through the parameters we focused on. Table 5.1 shows differences 
and peculiarities found for every text typology.
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CHAPTER 1                                                                    
POLITICAL LANGUAGE 
1.1. Language connected to politics 
Language is the primary form of politics: through language in fact political 
powers struggle, and discourses, namely verbal representations, are necessary to 
legitimate political actions and authorities. Language in a word is the first 
manufacturer of consensus, used to exercise power especially with coercive intent. 
This is an important issue even in a democracy, where there could be subtle language 
based process of ideological impositions. Manufacturing consensus is needed by 
political authorities to accomplish their tasks and legitimate them in the eyes of 
citizens (Chilton, 2004). This process involves the content of political discourse, 
declaring the very rationale by which it is to be defined, understood and acted upon. It 
is a subtle process, since it conveys not just the linguistic content but ―the corpus of 
the political beliefs underpinning any given statement‖ (Geis, 1987). This is the 
process through which political speech reinforces ideological issues, pulling down 
other and eventually transmitting unconsciously the rightness of actions brought by the 
dominant political authority. In other words, the language of political agencies reflects 
the ideological presuppositions, and it is the same principle through which any 
language typology, as in the ordinary language, every linguistic choice reflects the 
frame of thought of the speaker, or the different expressions and resources of 
languages all over the world reflect the different representation of reality of the people