Lexical shifts, substantive changes, and continuity in State of the Union discourse, 1790-2014

Alix Rule (1) , Jean-Philippe Cointet (2) , Peter S. Bearman (1)

1 Columbia University [New York]
2 Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Sciences, Innovations, Sociétés

This study reveals that the entry into World War I in 1917 indexed the decisive transition to the modern period in American political consciousness, ushering in new objects of political discourse, a more rapid pace of change of those objects, and a fundamental reframing of the main tasks of governance. We develop a strategy for identifying meaningful categories in textual corpora that span long historic durees, where terms, concepts, and language use changes. Our approach is able to account for the fluidity of discursive categories over time, and to analyze their continuity by identifying the discursive stream as the object of interest.

Mots clés: State of the Union; text analysis; networks; natural language processing; American history; COMMUNITY STRUCTURE; NETWORKS; SIMILARITY; RETRIEVAL; PRESIDENT; WORLD

Mots clés: TEXT; COOCCURRENCE

Domaines: Sciences de l'Homme et Société; Sciences du Vivant [q-bio]

Alix Rule, Jean-Philippe Cointet, Peter S. Bearman. Lexical shifts, substantive changes, and continuity in State of the Union discourse, 1790-2014. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015, 112 (35), pp.10837 - 10844. ⟨10.1073/pnas.1512221112⟩. ⟨hal-02636957⟩