Metrical analysis of the speeches of 2008 American presidential election candidates

In 2008, an American presidential election was held. In this study, we examined the speeches of three candidates to educe their linguistic features statistically. In short, frequency characteristics of character-appearance and word-appearance were investigated. These characteristics were approximated by an exponential function. Furthermore, the percentage of required vocabulary and that of basic vocabulary were calculated to obtain the difficulty-level as well as the K-characteristic of each material. As a result, it has been shown that the speeches of Mr. McCain have the same tendency as English literature in the character-appearance, and his speeches tend to be more difficult than other candidates. Moreover, the dispersions of the K-characteristic for three candidates´ speeches are similar to coefficients c and b for character-appearance.