Tracking language change in the American government: keys in the old and new administrations

This paper is part of a larger project that investigates the language of American, British and Italian politicians, with a special focus on words and phrases, key-words and key-phrases as uttered at the government and at the opposition. The present work in particular is a diachronic analysis of keywords first and key-clusters after as uttered by the previous and by the current American administrations: thus, speeches, statements, press conferences and interviews delivered by Barack Obama are referenced against those delivered by George W. Bush to uncover the main concerns of the new government that were not prioritized in the old administration. The opposite procedure is also carried out, to unveil the concerns of the previous government that today have been overcome or that simply no longer figure at the top of the agenda, clearly signaling a change in priorities. There are several different concepts of keywords (Stubbs 2010: 21). The procedure used for identifying keywords and key-clusters in this research is the one devised by WordSmith Tools 6.0 (Scott forthcoming) and is based on simple verbatim repetition. The wordlists and clusters list generated in the two administrations are analysed and then compared, and the items that emerge are those whose frequency (or infrequency) in the study corpus is statistically significant when compared to the standards set by the reference corpus (Bondi 2010: 3). The topics that both governments deal with will not surface in the comparison, and issues such as Israel or Afghanistan, for example, will not stand out as prominent, namely as key, whereas those where there is a significant departure from the reference corpus – such as Iraq, freedom, terror, war, Saddam, or health, care, Libya, to name but a few – become prominent for inspection (Scott 2008), regarded as pointers which suggest areas which are worth mining (Scott 2010: 51). Relying on the assumption that the unit of language is “the phrase, the whole phrase, and nothing but the phrase” (Sinclair 2008), and that phrases, or aboutgrams (Warren 2010: 113), are a better means for uncovering the “ofness” of the texts, three-, four- and five-word clusters as uttered in the Democratic corpus are then referenced against those found in the Conservative corpus: the key-clusters emerging from the comparison are indicative not only of the “aboutness” of the text but also of the context in which they are embedded, relating to the major ongoing topics of debate (Partington 2003). Thus, it is unveiled that the war on terror, which was regarded as the signature in Bush’s speeches, is not the main concern in Obama, whose priorities are instead the recovery act, health care reform, clean energy economy, among others. Bearing in mind that phraseology is not fixed and that, in political discourse in particular, some phrases have a relatively short “shelf life” compared to others (Cheng 2004), the aim here is to track the language change from the old to the new administration, unveiling the aboutgrams which are prioritized today but were not an issue in the previous government. The other piece of software used to carry out the analysis is ConcGram 1.0 (Greaves 2009).