Detecting Openness, Power and Formality in Selected Speeches of Egyptian Presidents (1956-2015) and American Presidents (1981-2015) A Psycholinguistic Corpus-Based Study

Abstract

The present study analyzes the speeches of the last five Egyptian presidents (1956- 2015); namely, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar ElSadat, Muhammed Hosni Mubarak, Muhammed Morsi, and Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, as well as the last five American presidents (1981- 2015); namely, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. It aims at identifying the manifestations of openness, power, and formality in their speeches on the occasion of achievement, occasion of distress, and common occasion. The primary tool of analysis is Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) introduced by James Pennebaker, Martha Francis, and Roger Booth in 1993. This tool is the most suitable since it categorizes the analyzed words into the psychological, social, and emotive dimensions of language. The remarkable contribution of the thesis is that it detects the three features in the speeches of all the Egyptian presidents, which is not quite common in the literature of psycholinguistic analysis. This thesis has many objectives. It aims at highlighting comparisons among the presidents concerning how each one manifests the three features in his speeches. It also examines the effect of different occasions on the prominence of these features. It focuses more on how power is manifested during times of crises. The thesis also hypothesizes that formality is positively correlated to power, while negatively correlated to openness. In order to answer these questions, a set of linguistic indices are analyzed to highlight the use of each of the three features in the corpora under study. Influenced by Newman et al.’s model (2003) and Pennebaker (2011), openness is detected through analyzing pronouns, negation, exclusive words, details, conjunctions, discrepancy words, and big words. First-person singular and plural pronouns as well as modal expressions are indicators of power, according to Pennebaker (2001) and Critical Discourse Analysis. Adjective density determines the degree of text formality, as investigated by Fang and Cao (2009). The process of analysis starts with inserting the speeches into LIWC which yields percentages of the words detected, and classifies them under their respective categories. Since the Arabic and the English versions of LIWC are not 100% identical, the researcher had to modify in and add to the categories of the Arabic version. A number of words are added to the categories ‘negation’ and ‘discrepancy words’ in order to make them more