The end of year addresses of the Presidents of the Italian Republic (1948-2006): discoursal similarities and differences

This work uses statistical and linguistic procedures to analyse a corpus of 57 traditional End of Year addresses by nine presidents of the Italian Republic. These addresses are compared and contrasted in order to identify the discoursal distinctive features and the similarities and differences among them. The proposed methodology is an attempt to link traditional qualitative methods with modern textual statistics. Results show that the hypergeometric, chi2 and bootstrap tests are effective in identifying distinctive words among presidents ('between' perspective) and among addresses delivered by the same president ('within' perspective) and that individual characteristic features and personal traits are more important than other factors in the End of Year Addresses topics.