Kennedy's verbs: polarizing tools to describe eisenhower's impact on Montana's water resources in the late 1950s

Abstract

[eng] This study explores how verb sentimentality may alter meaning in political speeches. The text being analyzed is an address that John F. Kennedy gave in the Montana Convention Banquet during his 1960’s presidential campaign. His use of verbs is a notable contributor in distancing himself from president Eisenhower’s conservation policies. In order to justify this, the rolebased association method proposed by Fogel-Dror et al. (2018) has been followed in order to determine how the entities present in the speech (Republican, Democrat, Montana and the environment) altered the polar or neutral nature of verbs and, thus, participated in bestowing subjectivity to the address. Results show that, although Kennedy’s speech is subjective (after the pragmatic analysis, 39% of verbs are in a negative setting and 28.6% of them in a positive one), it does not agree with the initial perception that Kennedy had composed a predominantly negative speech, for data illustrates that the percentages between negative, neutral and positive verbs are similar. As a result, thanks to the identification of the subject and object of each utterance (RBA), it seems that most verbs in a negatively inclined context have the Republican party as the subject or agent, whereas verbs in positive utterances had a Democratic entity or natural resources in the subject or object clause. However, he kept a good balance of each tone, with a slight predominance of the negative one.