Keywords and phrases in political speeches

This paper analyses n-grams and concgrams in the speeches of Tony Blair and George W. Bush delivered from the beginning of 2005 till June 2007. The focus of the study is first on the single word climate, which is found to figure top of the list by referencing one million words spoken by the (now former) British Prime Minister against five million words spoken by the American President, and then on the cluster climate change, in that change was also picked up as key and was always found in company with climate. The issue of climate change clearly reflects Blair’s leading themes of the years under investigation. This work is an attempt to corroborate the assumption that phrases, in the form of n-grams and concgrams, namely in contiguous and non-contiguous sequences, are usually much better at revealing the “aboutness” of the text than individual words