“Primroses and Power: a Study on Linguistic Excellence
in Political Discourse”
Anna
Loiacono
Università degli Studi di Bari, Italy
Angela
Maria
D'Uggento
Università degli Studi di Bari, Italy
Barbara
Cafarelli
Università degli Studi di Bari, Italy
Rosaria
Romita
Università degli Studi di Bari, Italy
The aim of this paper is to focus on a linguistic corpus in order to detect, by
statistical methods and computational tools, either correspondences or contrasts
between the hypotheses made by the linguist and the applied procedures made by
the software experts.
The corpus is selected from nineteenth century Victorian speeches; in particular,
Parliamentary and political speeches delivered by Benjamin Disraeli, both as a
member of Parliament and as Prime Minister.
Analogous types of research have been recently carried out [see Labbè, Bolasco, Lebart, Salem, 1995] with reference to
contemporary politicians such as de Gaulle, Mitterand and the Italian
Berlusconi. In fact, computational research in political discourse is a highly
significant new brand of criticism, which contributes to the modern notion of
political contest by some more hidden truths that can be revealed. Nonetheless,
we should say that, in most cases, where contemporary politicians are concerned,
the use of "ghost writers" for writing public speeches definitely undermines
that language structure/personality relationship which justifies work in textual
analysis.
Dealing with 19th century England, we have considered Victorian politics as being
the first true "arena" for party politics and as constituting fundamental
principles for political dialectics.
The main source of reference was the collection of Selected
Speeches by T. E. Kebbel in two volumes, borrowed from the
Parliament Library in Rome. Disraeli's personal letters written to Lady Bradford
and Lady Chesterfield also constitute a valuable source of reference, in that
they unveil psychological traits and personal idiosyncrasies of the statesman.
Moreover, in classical biographies we have found revealing hints of modernity
and wisdom that we think useful to compare to our times. In a further
perspective, we would aim at setting up a series of parameters which might
characterise English political discourse, defining also its specific contexts by
comparing corpora (for example Tory vs Whig discourse or Conservative vs
Radical, etc.).
Some intriguing questions have led us to pursue this goal, bearing in mind the
old lessons of rhetoricians concerning oratory and trying to see them in the
light of modern standard rules: how great is the analogy existing between
oratorical qualities, original style and words, phrases and discourse markers
more or less unconsciously uttered by an individual? By which standards can this
analogy be assessed? And which is the "benchmark" for moral evaluative
judgement, when we use a meta-linguistic code to filter the quintessence of
discourse? Should, for instance, the most frequent items adhere in meaning and
collocation to their speaker's actual socio-political presuppositions? And in
which degree should their collocation be found in accordance with given
parameters? Moreover, what can computational analysis discover beyond or in
contrast to all previous evaluative criticism on the same subject to which so
many scholars have contributed in the course of centuries?
We have tried to answer these questions by examining, through data processing,
which linguistic marks might define or confirm the features for linguistic
excellence.
Our stylometric study is concerned with the Victorian century, an age rich in
syntactical perfection and lexical complexities.
We have selected thirty-four speeches given by Disraeli between 1830 and 1870,
and have processed them through the software programme "Lexico 2" and SPSS. The
corpus has 205,800 occurrences°, with a type/token ratio of 9.83% (known also as a measure of vocabulary
richness) and a Guiraud's coefficient G=44.61.
In table 1, for all the sub corpora in the decades, we show the the number of
occurrences (N), forms (V) and hapax (V1), the word with maximum frequency for
each decade.
Hapax forms (words used only once) constitute nearly the 50% of the total amount
of different words, which is a representative ratio marking a highly varied
though integrated vocabulary.
In table 2, we show a list of the fifty most important words considered as truly
connotative of Disraeli's mind and world, displayed according to total
decreasing frequency, making a distinction between the decades, the absolute
frequency (F) and the normalized occurrences (x 1000 words).
Moreover, we have disambiguated words (textual forms) in order to obtain the
correct rank and we have made a distinction, for some forms, between pronouns,
nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and conjunctions. The choice was made to build
up the so-called lexical universe of Disraeli's discourse: the chosen words
(i.e. power, principle, democracy, oligarchy, empire, etc.) have first been seen
as collocates and, for them, we have built their lexical universe, in order to
define specific contexts and co-texts through the relationship of proximity and
distance.
We have patterned some meaningful words from a diachronic point of view, marking
the evolution of his political thought, throughout his long parliamentary
activity, detecting their characteristic trends and we have also carried out a
factor analysis for some groups of words, clustered according to some semantic
categories (i.e. self, key words, generic words, geography, negative words,
etc.)
What clearly appears by means of statistical exploitation is as follows:
- 1. High occurrence of a limited number of forms (mainly unspecific in meaning);
- 2. High occurrence of hapax forms and of various different forms, used with a very low frequency;
- 3. percentage of polysyllabic adjectives of Latin origin, used according to alliterative and symmetric structures, creating an appealing effect of harmony and balance. The same effect is obtained by collocating meaningful words used in pairs and the same occurs with words plus adjectives often used in pairs;
- 4. High percentage of adjectives in relation to the corpus as a whole and most of them belonging to the semantic category of "greatness" and of "positive feeling".
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