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

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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