الفهرس 
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Abstract
English Summary
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 comprehensive. The category ‘exclusive words’ is added to the Arabic dictionary. As for the analysis, part of it is manually done since the category of ‘adjectives’ is not present in the Arabic dictionary. The English adjectives are manually detected as well in order to guarantee the consistency of the results.
The results prove that the expression of the three features differ according to the occasion. As for the Egyptian presidents, they express more power on common occasions, and more formality during crises; however, openness is evenly expressed on the three occasions. As for the American presidents, the three features are remarkably expressed on the common occasions. Authenticity is generally the highest in the speeches of Mubarak and Clinton, power is markedly expressed in the speeches of Abdel Nasser and Obama, and formality is highly detected in the speeches of Morsi and Reagan.
Crises are found to have a negative effect on the expression of power. Among the Egyptian presidents, El Sisi is the only one who expresses the highest power during these occasions compared to his expression of power on the other two occasions. As for the American presidents, Obama’s expression of power in times of distress is the highest compared to power expressed by the other presidents on the same occasion. However, it is still not his highest score; an observation that highlights his power motivation. Generally, the Egyptian presidents are more negatively stricken by crises than the American ones; this observation explains their lower score in the expression of power during these occasions.
Concerning the hypothesis of the study, it is concluded that the positive relation between power and formality as well as their negative relation to openness is not maintained in all the cases. The speeches given by El Saddat, El Sisi, and Obama prove the positive relation between power and formality. However, they do not reflect their negative relation to openness. Meanwhile, the speeches of Morsi, H. W. Bush, and W. Bush show that power negatively correlates with formality. Consequently, the hypothesis of this thesis is not proved valid.
For future research in this scope, other content analysis tools can be used such as Coh-Metrix which has many similar features to LIWC. Concerning the data, instead of selecting some of the presidents’ speeches, all the speeches can be used for the analysis in order to ensure more validity and the generality of the results. Moreover, each one of the three features detected can be expanded in a separate research and investigated using more than one tool.