Honors Program
University Honors
Date of Award
5-2018
Thesis Professor(s)
Theresa McGarry
Thesis Professor Department
Literature and Language
Thesis Reader(s)
Martha Michieka, C. Wesley Buerkle
Abstract
A breakout star among American progressives in the recent past, Elizabeth Warren has quickly gone from a law professor to a leading figure in Democratic politics. This paper analyzes Warren’s speech from before her time as a political figure to the present using the quantitative textual methodology established by Jones (2016) in order to see if Warren’s speech supports Jones’s assertion that masculine speech is the language of power. Ratios of feminine to masculine markers ultimately indicate that despite her increasing political sway, Warren’s speech becomes increasingly feminine instead. However, despite associations of feminine speech with weakness, Warren’s speech scores highly for expertise and confidence as its feminine scores increase. These findings relate to the relevant political context and have implications for presumptions of masculine speech as the standard for political power.
Publisher
East Tennessee State University
Document Type
Honors Thesis - Withheld
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Jennings, Matthew, "Nevertheless, She Persisted: A Linguistic Analysis of the Speech of Elizabeth Warren, 2007-2017" (2018). Undergraduate Honors Theses. Paper 457. https://dc.etsu.edu/honors/457
Copyright
Copyright by the authors.
Included in
Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics Commons, Applied Linguistics Commons, Computational Linguistics Commons