Abstract
In this year, 2008, an American presidential election will be held. In this study, we examined the speeches of three candidates, that is, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain, to educe their linguistic features statistically. In short, frequency characteristics of character-appearance and word-appearance of their speeches were investigated. These characteristics were approximated by an exponential function: [ y = c * exp(-bx) ]. Furthermore, we calculated the percentage of required vocabulary for Japanese junior high school students and American basic vocabulary by The American Heritage Picture Dictionary to obtain the difficulty-level of each material. Besides, we examined the K-characteristic for each material. This index suggested by statistician named Udny Yule can express the richness of vocabulary in writings by measuring the probability of any randomly selected pair of words being identical. As a result, it has been shown that the speeches of Mr. McCain have the same tendency as English literature in the character-appearance, and his speeches tend to be more difficult than other candidates. In addition, the dispersions of the K-characteristic are similar to those of the coefficients c and b for character-appearance.
