Differences in Linguistic Features of Spontaneous Speech: The Case of Obama’s Speeches at the London, Toronto and Cannes G-20 Summit Press Conferences

Year 2014, , 39 - 45, 24.01.2014

Bilal Genç , Ali Göksu , Kağan Buyukkarcı

https://doi.org/10.14812/cufej.2014.003

Abstract

The research presented in this paper aimed to investigate the linguistic and discourse characteristics of Mr. Obama’s press conferences held after the G-20 summits in London in 2009, in Toronto in 2010 and in Cannes in 2011. The President’s speeches were divided into two separate parts: (1) the first part during which he spoke about his plans to deepen international connections and the second during which he answered the questions of journalists from different nationalities– question/answer session –considered as spontaneous speech text and labeled a TC, LC and CC. Using concordance software the number of types and tokens and the type-token ratio were calculated. The results show that although the number of tokens decreases chronically, in terms of the qualitative analysis all speeches display similar characteristics regarding vocabulary variation.

Keywords

Emotional language, Native language, Foreign language, Vocabulary

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