SMBC, Frame Semantics and Political Speech
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal had comic a while back about political speech. The idea was that, if you replace everything except nouns with nonsensical words, people will still be able to follow the speech. They concluded that if you can get the point from the nouns, the rest is a waste of space. Of course, it was a joke. But it still shows us something about language. However, this is not a feature of political speech, but language in general. It is often packed with information, and people are very good at deciphering meaning from fragments ...