The role of connectives in political speech.

Abstract

Even though connectives are small parts of a text which could be easily omitted the opposite is true. Connectives play an important role as they procure discourse coherence by connecting utterances. Moreover, previous studies showed that connectives facilitate text comprehension and text recall and can positively or negatively affect persuasion. This paper investigates the role of connectives in political speech by comparing the amount and type of connectives between the politicians who were announced the winners and those who were announced the losers of the presidential or vice-presidential debates. Although individual differences were found between politicians, there was no significant difference between announced winners and announced losers of the debates.