- Which words are dominant? Which are subordinate? What cultural and conceptual expectations does this visualization of King’s speech raise?
Dominant words include freedom, dream, nation, together, justice, etc.
Subordinate words include girls, pass, path, etc.
Cultural and conceptual expectations raise including justice and equality between black people and white people. The main topic of King’s speech is to call for freedom and equality of American society. King tried to bring people together.
- Enter the dominant terms from King’s speech, language English, period 1800-present day. What does the graphical representation tell us?Look at the time periods underneath and click on the peak periods. What are the source texts?Now, enter other dominant terms. What does the graph show you? Can you think of some explanations for this change?
The occurrences of freedom raise around between 1925 and 1960 and gradually decrease after 1960.
The word dream keeps increasing from 1800. The concept of dream attracts people more and more in the present. 
The mentions of “nation” gradually decreases a lot from 1800. My explanation is that the concept of nation is not weighted as much as it was in the past.
- What terms are dominant? Now create an Ngram with those two terms. What does the graph show you? Can you think of some explanations for this change?
Dominant terms include government, powers, happiness, right, mankind, history, etc.
The word “government” was mentioned fairly according to the Ngram. The frequencies of it decreased a little from 1860 to 1940. My explaination for it is that during 1860 and 1940, there were Civil War, World War I and World War II. The whole world was in a state of chaos and countries fought with each other so that there was not many things happened related to government since wars were dominant at that time.
This Ngram of the word “powers” indicates the decrement of powers in the literature work. I think it is because the society gradually moves towards equality and balance so that “powers” is not mentioned much in the present and authors don’t tend to discuss, complain or comment about “powers” which is why it appears less and less recent years.
- Extra credit:
http://www.davidicchiasmus.com/blog/authors-non-lds/martin-luther-king-jr-dream
What prosodic elements does the author of this site identify? In what way does this add to the power of King’s speech?
The author of this site identifies repeated thematic pattern. The contents of the speech gets deeper and deeper from the topic of “the greatest demonstration for freedom”. It makes King’s speech easy to follow.