John F. Kennedy Inaugural Address

President John F. Kennedy’s speeches are stylistically distinctive: clear, energetic, and repetitive structural patterns throughout the pieces, embedded with sharply contrasting elements and vivid, imaginative metaphors. Kennedy addresses his speeches often with a passionate, powerful tone that catches his audience’s attention and creates a resonant atmosphere around him. Here in this essay, I choose three of the most representative speeches by Kennedy – inaugural address, address at Rice University on nation’s space effort, and “Ich bin ein Berliner” – and analyze them using statistical data. I select sentence length, specific word frequency, and sentence structure frequency as the three stylistic features that characterize Kennedy’s speeches
It is meaningless to directly compare the data, since determiners, pronouns, and prepositions such as “the,” “I,” and “and” always appear much more frequently than other words. Nevertheless, we can consider the relative occurrence frequency – if a word appears more times than usual, then it must represent either Kennedy’s main points or his common phrases in his speeches. The relative frequency is calculated as the ratio between the rank of occurrence in the sample speeches and that in all texts (data can be found at http://www.wordfrequency.info/free.asp?s=y), and words with top relative frequency of occurrence are plotted in figure 2. Besides words that represent topics of speeches (such as Berlin and space), Kennedy emphasizes on words that call for actions and supports of his audience – “pledge,” “let,” and “both”; words that address the future – “beyond,” “shall,” “progress,” and “new”; and words that characterize American spirits – “freedom,” “peace,” “united,” and “knowledge.” Particularly, the rarely used word “pledge” occurs as many as seven times in Kennedy’s inaugural speech, each time as a repetition pattern “To (some group of people), we pledge (something).” This implies his extensive use of ethos as a persuasion strategy. In addition, as William Safire mentions in his introduction to Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History, “if you’re really stuck, put ‘new’ in front of any grand noun,” Kennedy uses exactly this trick frequently in his speech. For example, in the sentence: “This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers,” Kennedy repeats “new” for four times in order to emphasize the skyrocketing speed of technology development, thus urging his American citizens to support his space exploration