Linguistic Legitimation and Political Discourse: A Comparative Analysis of Lee Kuan Yew's rational pragmatism and Theodore Roosevelt's ethical progressivism

This study investigates how language functions as an instrument of political legitimation in two distinct governance regimes by conducting a systematic comparative discourse analysis of Lee Kuan Yew, founding Prime Minister of Singapore, and Theodore Roosevelt, twenty-sixth President of the United States. A corpus linguistics methodology was applied to two balanced subcorpora: the first twelve chapters of Lee Kuan Yew's memoir From Third World to First (60,795 words) and Theodore Roosevelt's collected speeches in The Strenuous Life (63,583 words). Analyses were conducted via Sketch Engine using the EnTenTen21 reference corpus. Key metrics included keyword keyness (log-likelihood, p < 0.05), Type-Token Ratio (TTR), Average Sentence Length (ASL), and Flesch-Kincaid readability scores. Qualitative analysis examined lexical strategy, syntactic architecture, rhetorical device density, pronoun strategy, and historical narrative framing. Results reveal two structurally opposed rhetorical regimes. Lee Kuan Yew's technocratic pragmatism is characterised by a low ASL (19.95), high TTR (13.97%), sparse figurative language, and an institutional–quantitative lexicon (PAP, CPF, NTUC) oriented toward measurable efficiency. Theodore Roosevelt's ethical progressivism exhibits a markedly higher ASL (32.75), a Flesch-Kincaid grade level of 15.5, dense moral abstraction (fellow-feeling, self-respect, strife), and rhythmic periodic syntax designed for affective mobilisation. These divergences correspond to opposing legitimation strategies: a rhetoric of necessity and survival in Lee Kuan Yew, and a rhetoric of continuity and democratic aspiration in Roosevelt. This study contributes a novel cross-contextual framework to the field of political discourse analysis by demonstrating that opposing linguistic regimes—technocratic clarity and ethical progressivism—can each attain high political efficacy when calibrated to their specific historical and geopolitical circumstances. The findings challenge the assumption that a single rhetorical paradigm underlies effective democratic or authoritarian governance and offer a replicable a

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