THE LANGUAGE OF WAR: CORPUS ANALYSIS OF JOE BIDEN AND DONALD TRUMP'S SPEECHES ON UKRAINE
Abstract
This article presents a multidimensional quantitative analysis of the rhetoric used in Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s speeches regarding the war in Ukraine. Utilizing Lingualyzer, a text analysis tool capable of evaluating hundreds of linguistic metrics across 41 languages, this research moves beyond traditional word-frequency to examine granular syntactic distributions and register variations. The paper is aimed to define the distinct lexical architectures of U.S. Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump, assessing how their specific linguistic choices measured against Douglas Biber’s cross-linguistic limits shape political narratives and public perception of the Russian invasion. This research looks at 8 speeches by President Biden (4,748 words total) and 13 speeches by President Trump (4,971 words total) in that they reflect American views on the events. The corpus is subdivided into two sub-corpora: the speeches delivered by Joe Biden and Donald Trump, respectively. However, the Trump sub-corpus is further divided into two sections: speeches delivered prior to becoming president, and addresses following his election and inauguration. Additionally, a social media network "X" sub-corpus consisting of four online statements was compiled and analysed. According to these results, Trump uses a high-frequency action-oriented vocabulary to project presidential authority, whereas Biden bases his story on substantial informational "triggers". In the end, this study shows how quantitative linguistic changes between verb-heavy and nominal-heavy registers represent essentially distinct approaches to orginizing political and societal responses to international war.
Keywords: corpus analysis, President Biden, President Trump, Ukraine, war.
