A corpus-driven study of the frame 'I want to + Verb' in U.S. Presidential speeches (1993-2010)

The aim of the paper is to identify and analyze the communicative functions of recurrent patterns containing the marker of speaker volition 'I want' complemented by to-infinitive verbs in U.S. Presidential speeches delivered by B. Clinton, G.W. Bush, B. Obama in the 1993-2010 period from a quantitative and qualitative point of view. Frequency data indicate that construction 'I want to + Verb' is one of the most common among the multi-word units in their corpora. In our investigation we have explored the variability of the component elements of the frame and compared the data emerging from U.S. Presidential Corpora with those retrieved from general reference corpora of English, i.e. the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The results indicate a significant higher frequency of this construction in the U.S. Presidential Corpus with respect to the various subsections of the reference corpora. This fact is subsequently related to the key roles of the frame in indexing a high degree of personal involvement on the part of the speaker and providing facilitative sign-posting to mark discourse organization.