Using a Small Corpus to Test Linguistic Hypotheses: Evaluating ‘People’ in the State of the Union Addresses

This paper argues that small corpora are useful in testing specific linguistic hypotheses, particularly those dealing with rhetoric, stylistics, and sociolinguistics. In particular, we hypothesize that creating a database of U.S. presidential speeches will allow for a diachronic exploration of language use at the highest political level, and enable a contrast to be drawn between legislative advances for minorities in the United States and the integration of those advances into the presidential lexicon. In order to test this hypothesis, we examine the corpora of State of the Union Addresses from 1945 to 2006. We demonstrate that while there was clearly a shift two decades ago to systematically portraying human beings as being made up of two genders, or being subsumed under a gender-neutral term, other aspects of gender, such as parenthood, are still stereotyped by American presidents. In short, analyzing lexical instances related to ‘people’ in the State of the Union address allows us not only to reflect on the values held by U.S. presidents, but also to systematically uncover how they use language to exercise power on the very people they are elected to serve.