A Corpus-Driven Analysis of the Inaugural Speeches of Georgian Presidents (1991–2024): A Politolinguistic Analysis of Political Discourse and Presidential Rhetoric

Abstract

The present study provides a corpus-driven analysis of the eight inaugural addresses delivered by Georgian presidents between 1991 and 2024, examining them as a distinct genre of political communication. The corpus was annotated using a UDPipe-based model and subsequently corrected manually. The analysis considers speech and sentence length, lexical frequencies, and collocations ranked by their logDice scores. In addition, the most frequent content words are compared with those in the Georgian National Corpus. The findings reveal a clear predominance of vocabulary relating to the state, the nation, and political institutions. The addresses also differ considerably in length and thematic emphasis, with both addresses marking the beginning of a second term being substantially longer than the corresponding first-term addresses. The diachronic distribution suggests a possible shift from state-building and institution-building in the earlier addresses towards international and European integration and, in the most recent address, a stronger emphasis on national and traditional values. The collocation analysis further identifies thematic associations with territorial integrity, electoral institutions, economic policy, democracy, freedom, family, and national identity. The findings highlight the potential of corpus-driven methods for identifying linguistic patterns and developing hypotheses for qualitative research on Georgian political discourse.