[23009969 - Open Linguistics] What Lies Underneath a Political Speech Critical Discourse Analysis of Thai PM’s Political Speeches Aired on the TV Programme Returning Happiness to the People (1)
5 Results and Discussion 5.1 Linguistic keywords (Gen. Prayuth vs the BNC) Linguistic keywords can be identified based on frequency. The first stage is to conduct a basic word frequency count to give absolute frequencies of words on the political speeches. Table 1 shows the five most frequent words for all the scripts collected. Table 1. Five most frequent words in Gen Prayuth’s political speeches No. Top 5 Words Absolute Frequency Examples 1 the 19961 The NCPO; The military the second phase theforming of a government the reform council the legislative council the principles the people 2 to 12702 tothe Thai people tothe law toensure minimal effects toavoid human rights violation to return happiness 3 and 10576 wind, solar power, andbiomass central and rural reforms villages, sub-districts, districts andprovinces peace and security rules and regulations 4 of 9110 performance of the concerned individuals disbursement ofthe national budget control of the situation stability of the country some ofthe media 5 in 5997 in Thailand inpreventing violent conflicts in tourist areas in a society in the reconciliation effort Initial findings can be drawn from Table frequency of the article the in the form of noun phrases (e.g. the people The military;the reform council thelegislative council, which reflects the general nature of English language writing. The article the is also commonly found in written texts at sentence or higher level to
