Word Length in Political Public Speaking: Distribution and Time Evolution-Reference-Cited by-同舟云学术

Word Length in Political Public Speaking: Distribution and Time Evolution

Published:2024-02-21 Issue:3 Volume:26 Page:180
ISSN:1099-4300
Container-title:Entropy
language:en
Short-container-title:Entropy

Author:

Tsizhmovska Natalia L.¹,Martyushev Leonid M.¹²^ORCID

Affiliation:

1. Technical Physics Department, Ural Federal University, 19 Mira St., 620002 Ekaterinburg, Russia

2. Institute of Industrial Ecology, Russian Academy of Sciences, 20 S. Kovalevskaya St., 620219 Ekaterinburg, Russia

Abstract

In this paper, word length in the texts of public speeches by USA and UK politicians is analyzed. More than 300 speeches delivered over the past two hundred years were studied. It is found that the lognormal distribution better describes the distribution of word length than do the Weibull and Poisson distributions, for example. It is shown that the length of words does not change significantly over time (the average value either does not change or slightly decreases, and the mode slightly increases). These results are fundamentally different from those obtained previously for sentence lengths and indicate that, in terms of quantitative linguistic analysis, the word length in politicians’ speech has not evolved over the last 200 years and does not obey the principle of least effort proposed by G. Zipf.

Publisher

MDPI AG

Link

https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/26/3/180/pdf

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