Fellow or foe? A quantitative thematic exploration into Putin’s and Trump’s stylometric features

Abstract

Thematic concentration, a quantitative linguistic method, can reflect the speech style of a particular person. It may, to some degree, reflect the degree of a speaker’s intention to communicate certain themes. There has been limited empirical research on the similarity between Trump and Putin with respect to their linguistic features. Thus, the present study aims to compare Putin’s and Trump’s stylometric features and political themes based on thematic concentration with a corpus of Putin’s, Medvedev’s, Trump’s, and Obama’s speeches. Results show that 1) Both Putin’s and Trump’s speeches’ thematic concentration values are significantly or marginally significantly different from their precedents’. 2) Two leaders pay great attention to the concept of nationalism. 3) Thematic words of their speeches were slightly different across periods, reflecting the influence of external factors on the choice of language. The results of the present study may shed light on the stylometric studies of Putin and Trump.