Televised U.S. presidential debates are the most-watched, if not the most-researched, political events in history. While prior studies have largely focused on general election contests, this ...longitudinal content analysis used DICTION software to parse the effects of election level, partisanship, and time on the candidates' word choices or verbal styles in 35 general and 121 primary election debates. The results indicate that general election debate rhetoric contained significantly more optimism and certainty than primary debate rhetoric. Additionally, the rhetorical cleavage between the parties was located in the primary debates where the Democratic candidates used significantly more rhetorical realism, activity, and commonality than Republican candidates who used more rhetorical certainty. Further, we also found significantly less rhetorical certainty in the 2010s and the 2020 general election debate rhetoric than in the 1960s and 1970s. Finally, we found interaction effects on optimism and realism that also supported our propositions that U.S. presidential candidates' rhetoric is meaningful at the semantic level, and that their verbal styles may reveal informative perspectives on the speakers and their speech acts.
This article deals with some grammar aspects of oral language, which includes an extense sense of the concept of grammar itself. The linguistic characteristics of orality are studied in relation to ...the physical, cognitive and sociopragmatic factors that intervene in speech’s production and reception. The specific grammatical elements that are presented, in a panoramic vision, are the tonal unit, basic unit of oral speech; the informative progression and the RUT restriction; the grammatical categories and the verbal style; the role of subordination in clausal composition; and, to conclude, the nature and the function of textual connectors in the organization of oral discourse. On the whole, a contribution to the explanation of the mobile, diverse, polyvalent and complex nature of the oral language is attempted.
The present paper addresses the problem of syntactic transfer in Polish-English non-literary translations performed by inexperienced translators. It is argued that many grammatical errors and ...stylistic inadequacies result from the translator’s failure to recognize that the two languages exhibit different stylistic preferences. Polish syntax is more reliant on nominal style, which is marked by a high proportion of nouns (notably nominalizations) that sometimes form elaborate noun phrases. English (except for very formal registers) to a larger extent than Polish tends to favor verbal style, in which actions are more frequently depicted by verbs and verbal modifiers. This hypothesis is supported by quantitative and qualitative data from both languages. The latter part of the paper shows that syntactic and stylistic problems in Polish-English translation can be overcome by denominalization – a translation procedure which consists in transforming noun phrases containing abstract nouns into clauses. Its application enhances target text clarity, contributing thus to the production of plain and natural-sounding prose.
This article examines the relationship between a governor's verbal style and his success in achieving his legislative goals. We add a measure of verbal style developed by Roderick Hart to a ...traditional model used by scholars of political chief executives to explain legislative success. We apply this model to the State of the State addresses of six governors of Florida who served between 1966 and 2006. Our findings reflect the validity of the truism "words matter." Governors who use words and phrases that connote enthusiasm, activity, and realism are more successful in the legislative arena than those who do not.
Many people with visual impairments complain about the poor accessibility of conventional CAPTCHA systems because the audio-style test is too difficult for humans. Even a U.S. governmental site, the ..."We the People" public website, was criticized for the same reason, and thus it implemented a more accessible quiz-based CAPTCHA system. However, this system is vulnerable to simple heuristics. In this study, we demonstrate the insecurity of this type of CAPTCHA system. We demonstrate that our solver program can beat the CAPTCHA with a success rate of over 99%. In addition, we propose a new verbal-style system to replace the quiz-based CAPTCHA. Our system synthesizes several sentences, which have different degrees of naturalness in terms of their contextual meaning, from a set of source documents using a flexible-order Markov chain. Only human users can perceive the difference in the semantics and select the most (or the least) meaningful option correctly. This test is implemented in a verbal style, which means that it is universally suitable for any type of perceptual channel. We implemented our proposed scheme and analyzed its security based on experiments.
With the growing interest in robot related research and industry, there is a demand to shape user experience more sophisticatedly in human-robot interaction. The purpose of this study is to define ...the elements for manipulating robot's verbal anthropomorphism and investigate the influence on user experience associated with spatial context. Based on the identified elements, we divided the robot's anthropomorphism into three levels (high, medium, low) and associated them with two spatial contexts (open, closed). The results revealed that a higher level of verbal anthropomorphism mostly induced positive user experiences; however, people sometimes tended to prefer a medium level, especially in terms of usefulness. Further, privacy concerns were significantly higher in open space. Consequently, we propose that designers and researchers deviate from the two levels of anthropomorphism (e.g., high or low, existing or not) generally used in prior studies to a new perspective that also considers the spatial context.
Kachru’s (1985) distinction between English as a native language (ENL), English as a second language (ESL) and English as a foreign language (EFL) has had an enormous influence on the modelling of ...Englishes worldwide, triggering a wealth of lexical and grammatical descriptions of varieties in all three Kachruvian circles. In research studies following this paradigm, institutionalised ESL varieties (for example, Indian English or Singapore English) and EFL variants (for example, French or German Interlanguage) have been treated fundamentally differently on the basis of these different paradigms alone. For example, ESL varieties are characterised as norm-developing, so that all kinds of
