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© Dalia Hamed. This work is published under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/legalcode (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to apply a corpus-assisted analysis of keywords and their collocations in the US presidential discourse from Clinton to Trump to discover the meanings of these words and the collocates they have. Keywords are salient words in a corpus whose frequency is unusually high (positive keywords) or low (negative keywords) in comparison with a reference corpus. Collocation is the co-occurrence of words.

Design/methodology/approach

To achieve this purpose, the investigation of keywords and collocations is generated by AntConc, a corpus processing software.

Findings

This analysis leads to shed light on the similarities and/or differences amongst the past four American presidents concerning their key topics. Keyword analysis through keyness makes it evident that Clinton and Obama, being Democrats, demonstrate a clear tendency to improve Americans’ life inside their social sphere. Obama surpasses Clinton as regard foreign affairs. Clinton and Obama’s infrequent subjects have to do with terrorism and immigration. This complies with their condensed focus on social and economic improvements. Bush, a republican, concentrates only on external issues. This is proven by his keywords signifying war against terrorism. Bush’s negative use of words marking cooperative actions conforms to his positive use of words indicating external war. Trump’s positive keywords are about exaggerated descriptions without a defined target. He also shows an unusual frequency in referring to his name and position. His words used with negative keyness refer to reforming programs and external issues. Collocations around each top content keyword clarify the word and harmonize with the presidential orientation negotiated by the keywords.

Research limitations/implications

Limitations have to do with the issue of the accurate representation of the samples.

Originality/value

This research is original in its methodology of applying corpus linguistics tools in the analysis of presidential discourses.

Details

Title
Keywords and collocations in US presidential discourse since 1993: a corpus-assisted analysis
Author
Hamed, Dalia
Pages
137-158
Publication year
2021
Publication date
2021
Publisher
Emerald Group Publishing Limited
e-ISSN
2632279X
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2529040999
Copyright
© Dalia Hamed. This work is published under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/legalcode (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.