To what extent do Democrats and Republicans use different connectives when arguing for or against a topic in presidential candidate debates, and can topic be used as a predictor for connective use?
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2020-07-06
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en
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This research aims to add to the current fields of political debates and discourse connectives. The main objective is to find a difference in the use of connectives by Republicans and Democrats based on stance and/or to try to predict connective use by looking into the topics discussed. In order to achieve this goal, the paper uses a corpus analysis of 6 political debates from 12 different speakers. After various statistical tests, some important results were discovered. Firstly, negative argumentation was the most frequent type for speech acts. Nexts, Temporal, Contingency and Comparison classes of connectives were most used when taking a negative stance, while Expansion connectives were more frequent for positive argumentation. Moreover, a significant relation was found between the topic discussed and the connectives used. Economy, Taxes, Healthcare and Iraq war often used Contingency connectives, while topics like Military included Comparison connectives. Finally, a significant difference was found between the topics discussed by Republicans and Democrats, supposing that topic could indeed be a predictor of connective use.
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