Word Length in Political Public Speaking: Distribution and Time Evolution

Area of Science:

• Linguistic analysis
• Quantitative linguistics
• Political communication

Background:

• Previous studies on political speech focused on sentence length.
• The evolution of word length in political discourse has not been extensively analyzed.

Purpose of the Study:

• To analyze word length distribution in public speeches by USA and UK politicians.
• To compare the fit of lognormal, Weibull, and Poisson distributions for word length.
• To determine if word length in political speeches has evolved over the past two centuries.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of over 300 public speeches from USA and UK politicians spanning 200 years.
• Statistical modeling to assess word length distribution using lognormal, Weibull, and Poisson models.

Main Results:

• The lognormal distribution provides a superior fit for word length compared to Weibull and Poisson distributions.
• Word length in politicians' speeches shows no significant change over time; average length is stable or slightly decreasing, while mode slightly increases.
• Findings contrast with previous research on sentence length evolution in political discourse.

Conclusions:

• Word length in political speeches is statistically stable over a 200-year period.
• The observed stability in word length suggests it does not follow Zipf's principle of least effort.
• Quantitative linguistic analysis indicates a lack of evolutionary trend in politicians' word usage over two centuries.