Saying Whatever It Takes: Creating and Analyzing Corpora from US Presidential Debate Transcripts

We first describe the creation of a corpus of American presidential debates from the American presidency project. We then use the corpus to present a stylistic analysis of presidential candidates from 2000 to 2016. A range of stylistic measures, including vocabulary richness, language complexity, and readability measures is applied. We aim to contribute to the current debate on the complexity of American presidential rhetoric and the role of the register of spoken language, by furnishing empirical data.