Race and gender in current American politics: A discourse-analysis perspective.

At least one study combined qualitative rhetorical analysis with quantitative word counts: Suleiman & O’Connell (2008) examined political guests on Larry King’s talk show. They found that the race of guests influenced the amount of non-standard speech they felt comfortable using, with Barack Obama, Condoleeza Rice, Hilary Clinton, and Colin Powell all using fewer non-standard forms than Bill Clinton. I mention this to note that researchers are beginning to take other sociological variables into account when examining discourse; I found this to be rare even in current studies. Suleiman and O’Connell’s quantitative analysis found that “Bill Clinton consistently talks the most, and Hillary Clinton the least” (p. 381). They note that this is consistent with Mehl’s finding that, contrary to the popular myth, women do not speak more than men. By comparing the amount of talk generated by political guests on a talk show to Mehl’s findings, the authors imply that the political interviewees verbal production can be generalized to the larger American population.