Six Rhetorical Profiles

The information profile scores high on speeches that are substantive and dense in policy content. The two core language variables of the information profile are academic and public language. Academic language is native to disciplinary enclaves involved in academic and professional expertise and in the specific formulations of language used to credential expertise. When a speech scores high on the information profile, it invariably scores high on the academic register, the public (i.e., institutional) register, and often both. In the context of our corpus of political speeches, informational political speeches show themselves to be highly didactic, delivered by elites, and typically addressed to elites. The information profile was rhetorical comfort food for Hillary Clinton. She seemed most at home speaking when detail and precision mattered.

The involvement profile focuses on the interplay of the communication participants more than on the communication content per se. This profile takes as core variables first person, interactivity, and reasoning. A speech scoring high on this profile must have high concentrations of at least one of these core variables and often exhibits high concentrations of two or three. The involvement profile makes a point of bringing the immediate audience into the design of the speech. It puts a higher emphasis on consensus-seeking, audience feedback, and even co-constructing the message than the information profile. Although there is no logical relationship between this profile and increasing the size and diversity of audiences, the involvement profile supports these accommodations by assigning the audience an active role to make their preferences and priorities visible.

The division profile features negative variables at it core, including negative emotion (e.g., sadness, fear, anger), negative relations (e.g., hate, rebellion, mutiny), and negative values (e.g., injustice, inequality, unfairness). The division profile seeks common cause with audiences by attacking positions, opponents, and enemies the audience commonly discredits. Clinton often deployed this profile in the Senate when she went up against Republicans and foreign adversaries. The division profile exhibits further contextual plasticity in its capacity to combine with non-core variables. It can combine with a positive-relational non-core to create an "us versus them" mindset. It can combine with a non-core of personal or first-person involvement variables to indicate a negativity that has been personally or autobiographically experienced firsthand.

The narrative profile presents a flow of events organized linearly across a timeline. It features narrative as a core variable, which includes verbs that signify witnessed event verbs (e.g., came, saw, conquered), and many varieties of temporal expression indicating time/date (e.g., September 11, 2001), time shifts (e.g., next week), time duration (e.g., during the night, for three weeks), and sequence (e.g., clauses fronted by time adverbials such as before, after, next, preceding, following). Narratives gain contextual plasticity when they mix with a non-core of past time and persons. Clinton relied on storytelling in governing, especially as first-lady and to a lesser extent as secretary. But the profile fell dormant in Clinton's senate years that launched her run against Obama. Despite her superior resume in the senate, she paid the price in the 2008 campaign when Obama offered a clinic in the narrative profile to rouse Democrats with stories that linked the American founders to the Civil Rights movement of the 60s. Perhaps having learned her lesson, Clinton resurrected a statistically noteworthy narrative profile in her race against Sanders.

The litigator profile manifests when a speaker, typically on the defensive, seeks to defend a past record or position that has fallen into negative attention or even eclipse. It relies on the core variables of first person (e.g., I, me, my), forceful language (e.g., phrasing intensifying words like very, exceedingly, overwhelming), and past (e.g., was, has been, had been done). Clinton was the sole speaker in our corpus who showed off this profile when she found herself running behind Obama and defending her record of accomplishment against Obama's record of hope and inspiration.

The unity profile inversely mirrors the division profile by seeking solidarity on the strength of various flavors of positivity rather than negativity. It emphasizes positive emotion (e.g., joy, exhilaration, comfort), positive relations (e.g., love, admiration, respect), and positive values (e.g., justice, fairness, opportunity). The unity profile powered Clinton through the many ceremonial speeches she gave as first lady, senator, or secretary when she eulogized leaders, presented awards, introduced speakers, entertained audiences, and thanked people for their service. She often turned to unity in her run against Trump to offer a counter to his incessant divisiveness. This profile mixes with a non-core of persons and sometimes slight bursts of emotional surprise (astonishing, incredibly).