Analysing American Political Discourse - A Text Complexity Perspective

| 1 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