October 03, 2004
The rhetoric of silence
I've pointed out that in Thursday's debate, John Kerry's sentences were 17.7% longer than George Bush's. Since the two men had the same amount of time to speak, you expect this to mean that Kerry used fewer sentences. And he did, 468 to 476. However, that's only a 1.7% difference. Kerry accounted for most of his greater sentence length not by using fewer sentences, but by packing more words into the same amount of time. 15.8% more, 7,136 to 6,165.
How'd he do that? New LexicoTardis® technology from the Rockridge Institute? Well, there are four obvious possibilities. First, Kerry might have talked faster. Second, he might have used shorter pauses. Third, he might have paused less often. Fourth, he might have used intrinsically shorter words.
A few quick and simple measurements suggest that the second of these four was the key factor. In the section of the debate that I examined, Bush used about the same number and frequency of pauses as Kerry did, but Bush's pauses were much longer. In between the pauses, Bush actually talked faster, but the pauses were so much longer that his overall speech rate was slower. This was measurably true in the beginning of the debate, and I suspect that the pattern continued or strengthened as time went on.
At least in the beginning of the debate, some of Bush's pauses also seem to derive more from cognitive factors internal to his speaking process, than from any consideration of the effects on the listener. In contrast, Kerry's early pauses seem more often to have been calculated for rhetorical effect.
In order to look at this question, I segmented each candidate's first (two-minute) answer and first (90-second) rebuttal into periods of speech and silence. I ignored silences less than 300 milliseconds long, since there can be normal phonetic events in this range, and often such short silences are not perceived as silent pauses at all. I counted each "turn" as starting when Jim Lehrer stopped talking, and ending when the candidate stopped talking for the last time. I used the official debate transcripts as an arbiter of word counts and sentence divisions, though I noted that these are slightly wrong in several places.
The basic result is striking. Across their first 210 seconds of debating, the two men were quite similar in overall number of silent pauses (57 for Bush, 60 for Kerry), and frequency of pausing (16.1 per minute for Bush, 17.3 per minute for Kerry). Both men averaged 9.7 words per silent pause. However, Bush's pauses averaged 84% longer (1.1 seconds vs. about 0.6 seconds), and so Bush spent 75% more time in silence (62.7 seconds vs. 35.9 seconds).
As a result, Bush's overall speech rate was slower (155 words per minute vs. 167 words per minute), but while the two men were actually talking, Bush talked considerably faster (220 words per minute vs. 202 words per minute).
Now, as with most other sorts of measurements, pauses are neither intrinsically good nor intrinsically bad in a debate (within reasonable limits, of course). For example, John Kerry's longest pause (1.268 seconds) was his first (answer-internal) one, and it was a rhetorically effective gesture.
Jim Lehrer: Do you believe you could do a better job than President Bush in preventing another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States?
John Kerry: [pause 0.278] Yes, I do. [pause 1.268] But before I answer further, let me thank you for moderating. [pause 0.588] I want to thank the University of Miami [pause 0.564] for hosting us. And I know the president will join me [pause 0.831] in ...
This 1.278-second pause underlined the gravitas and simplicity of his answer, and also set off his interpolated welcoming remarks from his answer proper. (Here's a sound file of the passage above).
George Bush's longest pause was also one of his first ones, but it was by no means such a success [audio link].
Jim Lehrer: Mr. President, you have a ninety-second rebuttal.
George W. Bush: [pause* 0.055] uh uh I- [pause* 0.165] I, too, thank the University of Miami, and [pause 0.454] and uh [pause 2.116] and say our prayers are with [speeds up] the good people of this state, who've suffered a lot. [pause 1.304] um [pause 1.507] September the eleventh {sigh} [pause 1.212] changed how America must look at the world. ...
The "pauses" marked with asterisks were not counted as pauses in my tabulation, as they were below the .3-second threshold. I've put them in here to underline the first mistake that the President made here. Rather than pausing for a short time to get ready to speak, he jumped in as soon as the moderator finished. The 55 millisecond separation is not noticeable as a pause. But what he jumps in with is the rapid disfluency "uh uh I-", followed by another sub-threshold silence of 165 msec., followed by his actual opening. The whole disfluent beginning only amounts to about 650 msec., and it would have been better to stay silent for that period of time. Kerry's first rebuttal begins with a 929-msec. silence, and that sounds fine, much better than filling the pause with uh-uh-ing.
After that shaky start, the president's continuation is worse. He says "I, too, thank the University of Miami, and", which is fine as far as it goes, but then he kind of goes off line for a while. He pauses for almost half a second, temporizing with "and uh" (which was elided from the official transcript), and then pauses for more than two seconds before continuing, very rapidly, "and say our prayers are with the good people of this state, who've suffered a lot." The whole "[pause] and uh [pause]" sequence lasts 3.322 seconds, which is really a lot of dead air in a formulaic opening.
I agree with Jay Nordlinger that Bush is capable of doing much better than he did in this first debate. In his stump speeches, he's used to using long pauses to give time for audience reaction. That may be why he tends to use longer pauses in general -- but it doesn't explain his apparent distraction and disfluency at the very start of his first turn in this debate.
This distraction apparently continued as the president turned to the set piece with which he had probably intended to open the debate, starting "September the eleventh changed how America must look at the world." It's a good passage, in my opinion. The delivery was weak, though, starting with the strange exasperated sigh at the end of "eleventh", and continuing with the even odder timing of the second sentence:
And since that day, our nation [slows down] has... been.. on... a... [pause 0.599] multi-pronged strategy to keep our country safer.
which I guess might originally have been written as something like "my administration has been implementing a multi-pronged strategy to keep our nation safer..." If so, W recovered pretty well from substituting the wrong noun phrase in subject position, but he should not have been behind that particular eight ball to start with.
Overall, it seems almost as if W was rattled by having to interpolate some words of thanks, as Kerry did, before launching into his first set of prepared remarks (yes, I know it was a rebuttal, but ...).
For those who want to delve into some deeper phonetic wonkery here, the following table summarizes the measurements I made. Note that I did this all rather quickly, so I there is probably a mistake or two; but I'm pretty confident that the overall conclusion is correct. At least it's correct with respect to the first 420 seconds of the debate -- obviously things changed somewhat over the course of the encounter, and it'd be interesting to see how. But I'm pretty sure that the basic result will hold up -- Bush used longer pauses, and didn't always use them effectively.
| Duration | Sentences | Words | Pauses | Pause time | Speech time | Duty Factor | WPM (gross) |
WPM |
Words per pause | Pauses per minute | MSec. per pause | |
| Kerry Answer #1 |
117.9 |
21 |
340 |
36 |
20.3 |
97.6 |
82.8% |
173 |
209 |
9.4 |
18.3 |
564 |
| Bush Rebuttal #1 | 91.3 |
16 |
229 |
23 |
24.1 |
67.2 |
68.3% |
150 |
205 |
10.0 |
15.1 |
954 |
| Bush Answer #1 |
121.5 |
30 |
322 |
34 |
38.6 |
82.9 |
73.7% |
159 |
233 |
9.5 |
16.8 |
1,135 |
| Kerry Rebuttal #1 |
90.7 |
13 |
242 |
24 |
15.6 |
75.1 |
82.8% |
160 |
193 |
10.1 |
15.9 |
650 |
| Bush overall | 212.8 |
36 |
551 |
57 |
62.7 |
150.1 |
70.5% |
155 |
220 |
9.7 |
16.1 |
1,100 |
| Kerry overall | 208.6 |
34 |
582 |
60 |
35.9 |
172.7 |
82.8% |
167 |
202 |
9.7 |
17.3 |
598 |
For those who want even more detail, here are the histograms of pause durations (remember this is just in the first 2-minute answer and the first 90-second response from each candidate):
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I'd like to repeat my earlier comment about the growing focus on political style as opposed to content: "As a linguist, I reckon it's good for business. As a citizen, I think it's bad for the country."
There's nothing wrong with paying attention to the phonetics of rhetorical effectiveness. But this is the proper study of linguists and (advisors to) politicians, not voters at large -- except insofar as it may help to avoid being manipulated. So the rest of you should go read some policy statements and discuss them with your friends and neighbors.
Posted by Mark Liberman at October 3, 2004 01:07 PM