Biden-Palin Linguistics 

 This post looks at the linguistics of last night's Biden-Palin debate. Palin used the word "reform" 12 times compared to Biden's none. Biden used "middle class" 12 times to Palin's one. 


  
Here's a sequel to my earlier  Obama-Clinton post . Overall, 

 Overall, Biden uttered 7,065 words and Palin 7,646, with a total of 2,117 unique words. Which words did Biden use significantly more or less than Palin? For each word, we apply a chi-squared test that the candidates spoke the word with equal probability. Finally, we sort the list by p-value, highlighting the differences. I've eliminated words that appear over 50 times (mostly stop words like "the," which Palin evidently used a couple hundred times more than Biden). 

     Word    Biden    Palin    pval     also   3  47  0.0000    their  32   4  0.0000    number  15   0  0.0002    want   0  16  0.0003    united  16   1  0.0004    policy  22   4  0.0004    just   6  28  0.0007    those  10  34  0.0013    too   0  13  0.0014    they  41  18  0.0015    well  24   7  0.0019    these   1  15  0.0020    said  40  18  0.0022    reform   0  12  0.0023    who  11  34  0.0025    even   3  19  0.0025    down  16   3  0.0034    gwen  16   3  0.0034    

 Observations: 
  
	 Look at all the connectors in the Palin column: "also," "just," "too." She uses these words to string together her thoughts.  
 Biden's favored conjunctions are "number" -- from his several "number one, number two" formulations -- and "well."  
 Two interesting ones are "policy" (Biden 22, Palin 4) and "reform" (Palin 12, Biden 0). These were certainly buzzwords from debate prep.  
  

 We can also look at bigrams, pairs of words, in a similar way.  
  
	 Biden used "United States" 16 times as opposed to Palin's 1.  
 Like McCain, Palin only once used the term "middle class," compared to Biden's 12. To be fair, she made several allusions to the middle class without mentioning the word. 
 Here's an interesting observation: Palin shares many of  Obama's constructions ; her favorite conjunctions are "and that's" and "and i."  
  

     Word    Biden    Palin    pval     the united  16   1  0.0004    united states  16   1  0.0004    we have   9  34  0.0007    want to   0  14  0.0009    he said  11   0  0.0016    have got   0  12  0.0023    and i   6  25  0.0025    that is   4  21  0.0026    and that's   1  14  0.0032    middle class  12   1  0.0035