Git Diagramming "The Weave"

Not to that extent. Most public speakers try to convey one coherent thought they were working on before.

Trump just rumbles like my granddad

We do not all talk like Trump.

Probably not all. When senility hits? Sure.

Do you reckon you could take some of Obama's speeches and do the same thing as this with comparable results?

If we all spoke like this, noone would remark on Trump speaking like this.

Weave for yourself. Prove it: Post a link to your own public writing anywhere near as bad as this, or admit you'd be ashamed to. I bet all of a sudden you're speechless and won't, because you know you're wrong and I'm right. So instead, explain why you're such a thin skinned boot licker?

There's a difference between writing and speech, and it is rather amazing to see unedited transcripts of extemporaneous speech. Hesitations, "repair" of ungrammatical utterances, abandoning sentences and restarting them, change of topic without clear warning.

There are unusual things about Trump's communication: extreme informality, seemingly not running things past advisors or editors (for both speech and writing), and probably making things a lot more personal than other presidents have done (talking more about himself; talking more about his experiences, opinions, and emotions; talking more about individual friends and enemies). Maybe also a far greater willingness to make digressions, whether personal or not.

Still, I think the prior commenter is right that we can be surprised by how disfluent almost everyone's extemporaneous speech appears when precisely transcribed. This is often hidden because published interviews or speeches in the press are usually extensively edited, so you won't see something like

"And I, um, I said, well you know, I said that we-- we're going to fix this pro--problem, uh, this problem that's been affecting a lot, a lot of people."

Instead, you'll see something like

"And I said that we're going to fix this problem that's been affecting a lot of people."

There was a big controversy about Dan Quayle as vice president and about George W. Bush as president because they both seemed to make a lot of speech errors and misstatements. I think I remember some linguists complaining that the oddities of both Quayle's and Bush's were probably being exaggerated merely because people were paying such close attention but were unaccustomed to seeing carefully transcribed speech. And I think the same is true for Trump's speech, even though he is also flouting various communication norms in both his writing and his speech, sometimes consciously.

Earlier presidents also had more patience for delivering prepared written speeches, from paper or from a teleprompter. For many of their speeches, they were extemporizing less, and when they did extemporize, they were comparatively better at keeping on-topic.

You're probably thinking about Obama's prepared speeches. A fair comparison would rather involve spontaneous conversations Obama partook in. And yes you would see the same patterns as in Trump's improvised announcement, the pauses, the hesitations, the sudden ruptures to fix unclear anaphora, the pushing and popping of items on the stack of topics, etc...

It's certainly not what is drawing attention to this thread, but Trump's ideas. However we should be aware that transcribing someone's speech with high fidelity 1°) will inevitably make them look dumb 2°) but only because we're not used to do this task, in fact our brains constantly do the opposite, fixing and filtering what we perceive in order to make out what is being communicated. You need some training to do that in fact!

Nonetheless, the author decided to included repair initiators ("uh") but not pauses, because I think he wanted to underline how dumb Trump sounds (pauses do not carry this connotation). This argument was used during the 2012 French presidential election against candidate Eva Joly (a prosecutor) in an attempt to tackle critics about her Norwegian accent on more objective grounds. Moving beyond right-wing gut-driven glottophobia, some people on the left thought they had found reasons to validate this criticism by examining improvised declaration she made during interviews through the filter of written transcription. I can accept this argument only if the author's article is a transcription of a spontaneous monologue (which is impossible of course).

Anyway I stress my point: we underestimate how messed up our actual linguistic production are. We're all too focused on the ideal of written language.

https://assets.cambridge.org/97811084/17211/frontmatter/9781...

>SPONTANEOUS SPOKEN ENGLISH

>A new, thought-provoking book on the theory of grammar and language processing, Spontaneous Spoken English is based on the analysis of authentic speech produced in real time. Drawing on insights from cognitive psychology, neurology, and conversation analysis, the author offers a fascinating, easy-to-follow account of why spoken English is structured the way it is. The traditional product-based approach to grammar is given up in favor of a dynamic, speaker-based perspective that integrates language-structural, neurocognitive, and dialogic aspects of speech production. Based on fresh empirical research, Haselow argues that grammatical knowledge rests upon two cognitive principles of linearization called microgrammar and macrogrammar, which are shown to interact in various ways. The book discusses a broad range of speech phenomena under an integrated framework, such as the omnipresence of “unintegrated” constituents (e.g. discourse markers), ellipses, or the allegedly “fragmented” character of syntax, and explains the mechanisms of processing efficiency that guide syntactic planning.

> And I think the same is true for Trump's speech

There are people who take these transcripts and re-enact what he's actually saying, but in their voice.

Doing that makes it immediately obvious that he's a rambling moron.

I'm not really convinced. I know that people do speak in a very broken up way but Trump's speech feels very unique, like it's intentionally broken up. It doesn't feel natural at all and I never notice that with other people, even people whose politics I detest.

I feel like you have a pet discovery about "spontaneous spoken English" and now you are seeing it everywhere even when it doesn't apply. Like one of those If you have a hammer everything looks like a nail kind of things.

Thank you! I studied linguistics, this is why I'm aware of this reality. I'm asking this because this is HN and chances that your worked on speech-to-texts systems is rather high. I was wondering how this problem is tackled in systems such as Whisper. I haven't used it much, but I definitively noticed that YouTube's transcription model try to strike a balance between transcription fidelity and readability. Sometimes it will elude some pauses & repairs to produce a more streamlined transcription, sometimes it will include them. It's an art I guess, but a model where you could tune this at inference time would be interesting.

As the sibling commenter says, normal speech (not delivered speeches) isn't anywhere near as coherent as writing.

This reply is kind of assuming a lot of bad intent for someone who's just saying that casual speech and reading a prepared speech are very different.

While I understand and agree with your point generally, you have to admit that Trump makes about ten times less sense than any average person, even when you're just listening to him (rather than reading a faithful transcript).

The focus on the oral aspect of language is in fact what helped linguistics become an autonomous discipline in Europe at the beginning of the previous century.

I think what bugs you in Trump's "speech" is that it looks like a one-sided conversation, and as such, features the kind of structure you'd in fact expect to find in a conversation:

    ┌ A: "Are you coming tonight?"
    │ ┌ B: "Can I bring someone with me?"
    │ │ ┌ A: "Boy or girl?"
    │ │ │ ┌ B: "What difference does it make?"
    │ │ │ └ A: "A question of balance."
    │ │ └ B: "A girl."
    │ └ A: "That works."
    └ B: "Alright, I'll come."

Found this in my copy of Kerbrat-Orecchioni's Les interactions verbales. A bit too heavy to be part of a dialogue in a book, you'd want to edit it, unless of course you're specifically looking for that refreshing touch of orality. And yet those "embbeded", "side sequences" of questions following questions are extremely frequent in everyday's speech. Moving beyond questions of theme (the micro-dependences between interventions in a conversation), the same kind of structures can be shown to exist at a higher level, that of conversation topics (the semantic content of the whole conversation, not the micro-negotiation for requesting clarification for instance): they are not neatly arranged in a hierarchy, can be intertwined, have very long dependence relationships (e.g. "Talking about [this topic we were discussing one hour ago]..."), etc...

So the git structure is not what is problematic with Trump's speech, it is in fact in line with the findings of conversational linguistics. But there is something beyond the mere inadequacy between the format and the role of president.

The conversational yet monologic nature of his speech, the total lack of transition markers, the constant violation of relevance continuity, the parasitic asides for his ennemies, down to the explicit:

>"You know, I do the weave. You know what the weave is? I'll talk about, like, nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together."

indicate that the needle that ties everything together is himself. Here's the conduct of topical continuity in his speech, the sole coherence point. Illness or strategy ?

https://www.unige.ch/clf/fichiers/pdf/10-Berthoud_nclf17.pdf

Topic management, enunciative processes, and conversational sequences

[...]

Indeed, these processes do not concern only the speaking subject: the topic is expressed for a listener, and its formulation is oriented toward them. In speaking, the speaker immediately positions a recipient in front of them, who becomes a co-speaker (Culioli 1985) and thus directly participates in this construction. From this perspective, the development of the topic depends on the reciprocity of enunciative perspectives, which manifests and materializes in interaction, where the topic does not belong to a single speaker but is collectively constructed, thereby constituting an activity of co-enunciation.

[...]

The participants are sensitive to the question, “Why this, now, addressed to me?” which notably arises when transitions, introductions, or topic recycling cannot be described and analyzed as such. The first analysts of the topic and conversation are therefore the speakers themselves:

    1 Roger: I'm gonna blackmail you
    2 Al: fuck you
    3 Ken: hhh
    4 Roger: better not I become pregnant easy hch // hch heh hhhhh
    5 Louise: heh hch hehhhh take birth control pills
    6 Roger: hehh heh
    7 Al: hey Isaw// saw airai neat//joke
    8 Ken: the Utile green pills?
    9 Al: I went down to the Ports O'Call Village, not to be changing the subject but she brought it up
    10 Roger: Not to be change- "I wouldn't change the subject"
    11 Al: but where was a birth con- they had a joke shop with a birth control pill and it was made out of styrofoam. put it between you lee- legs'n press very hard
    12 Louise: hch hhhhh
    13 Al: heh heh heh
    (Sacks, 1992, 1:539)

In this example, taken from a transcription of a therapeutic session for adolescents cited by Sacks, Al initiates a new topic in line 7 by linking it to an earlier element mentioned by Louise in line 5. In this way, he uses line 5 as a topical source for his joke, treating “birth control pills” as a previous topic. However, it appears that “birth control pills” is not considered a topic by the participants, which motivates the explicit marking with the phrase “not to change the subject.” What emerges here is the collective production and interpretation of the topic across sequences, which governs what can be described (“accountable”) as a transition, a change, or even a topic abandonment. It is not enough to establish virtual links with preceding elements; these links must also be recognizable and treated as appropriate by the interlocutors—something that an approach focusing on sequential markings must take into account (Mondada, 1995b).

I agree, however thinking you have to use a git-like branch n' merge structure specifically to analyse trump' monologue because he's that crazy, is a mistake. Normal conversations are like this too. See my other reply that hints at the fact that what's problematic about Trump's discourse is the lack of topical continuity structure. That role is carried out by Trump's own ego and it is made possible in proportion that everything and anything, like old roman roads, lead back to Trump. In Lacan 1961-62 course about identity, one can read:

>So, what does the neurotic want to know? I'm slowing my delivery here so you can hear clearly, as every single word is important. He wants to know what is real in that which is his passion – in other words, what is real in the effect of the signifier.

And I think this is exactly what Trump is on about. He wants to see for himself the effect of his own name as he utters it (hence the 3rd person). I don't think he came with that remark about "the weave" by accident. I think it was planned and "discussed" internally as the explicit, self-aware display of madness that would allow him to string this nonsense together, and by uttering it, absolve himself from the toxcicity of his own thought process and make it our problem – thus achieving the roaring effects he sought to find in the very name of Trump in the first place.

Hey don't forget to reply to my detailed comments !

I agree with a lot of this, but not with the statement that lots of people are like this. If you plotted the trees for most people, they'd have a few branches, but they'd largely get back to the point after one or two asides. Trump just jumps from topic to topic disjointedly, and then in the end just refers back to the original topic, again disjointedly.

He really isn't anywhere near as coherent as the average person, and I'm not American, so I don't even have a dog in this fight. I've only heard him talk, and I usually can't make out any point at all, which I personally have very rarely encountered with the average person (for the sober ones, at least).

Ok. I didn't say his speech bugged me, I said it was noticeably different to other people's speech.

I understand that speech and conversation branches. That's normal, that's not an issue. What makes it notable is how random the jumps seem to be, the seeming lack of logical connections between them, and the apparent randomness of when they rejoin the main branch, if they ever do.

The examples you show display very predictable stack-like behaviour which is very different to what is shown in the article.