Analysis of Function Words in Georgian Political Discourse: A New Perspective

Abstract

This study presents a quantitative linguistic and register-analytic investigation into the political rhetoric of Georgia’s first president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia. Analysing a corpus of 25 selected texts divided into three functional registers (official announcements, direct addresses, and interviews), the paper explores the systematic variation of the Type-Token Ratio (TTR), Guiraud’s index, and lexical density across different modes of discourse. Drawing on Halliday’s register theory and Gregory’s diatypic variation model, the research examines how the cognitive constraints of spoken and written channels shape the micro-linguistic patterns of political language, demonstrating that political discourse occupies a hybrid position between spoken and written modalities. The mathematical dependency of lexical diversity measures on text length is methodologically addressed through corrective transformations like the Guiraud index. Furthermore, the study contextualises the empirical results within the morphosyntactic typology of the Georgian language. The findings reveal that while Gamsakhurdia’s spontaneous discourse in interviews shifts toward a function-word-rich, relational clausal grammar, his texts overall maintain an exceptionally high lexical density, demonstrating a deeply compressed, nominal phrasal grammar traditionally attributed to highly planned written language. Methodologically, the analysis indicates that standard quantitative metrics exhibit significant limitations when applied to Georgian as a synthetic language. Consequently, the study argues for the development of language-specific adaptation models to ensure the valid application of metrics such as TTR and lexical density to morphosyntactically complex languages.