He also, however, uses the more distinctive positive-negative pattern:Īs is the case with Obama’s inaugural speech, Trump identifies problems with America’s institutions and infrastructure: ‘shuttered factories’, ‘dissipated’ wealth and confidence, ‘depletion’ of the military and ‘disrepair and decay’ of infrastructure. This is sometimes straightforward repetition: Together The simplicity of Trump’s grammar lends itself to that hallmark of the political speech: parallelism. (7) What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility – a recognition on the part of every American that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world duties that we do not grudgingly accept, but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task. In Obama’s speech there is an average of 1.92 verbs per finite clause, the higher number accounted for by sentences such as (verbs underlined): As a consequence, there is an average of only 1.28 verbs per finite clause in Trump’s speech. (6) What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the peopleīut these are very much in the minority.

Or sentences beginning with ‘what’ that contain multiple verbs:

(5) We’ve defended other nations’ borders while refusing to defend our own’ (4)…to become part of a historic movement the likes of which the world has never seen before He does occasionally make his utterances more complex by using relative clauses: The explanation for these differences is that most of Trump’s sentences are straightforward in their structure, consisting of either one clause or simple linked clauses, such as Trump uses 184 verbs (5.7% of the total word count) while Obama used 329 (13.6%). Trump’s clauses are shorter with the average number of words per finite clause at 10.28 for Trump and 14.08 for Obama. Trump’s speech has 143 (non-embedded) finite clauses against Obama’s 171. The speech is 1471 words long, compared with 2404 words for Barack Obama’s inaugural speech in 2009.

President Trump’s inaugural speech is short and grammatically simple.

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