STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF THE PRESIDENT’S SPEECHES DELIVERED FROM 2013 TO 2018

Résumé

This paper investigates a corpus of 60 speeches that president produced during his firstquinquennial between 2013 and 2018. Subsequently, a novel quantitative analysis based on descriptive and factorial methods are implemented on this corpus. These methods allow us to make an appraisal of president style of speaking, the vocabulary density, the diversity, the complexity and the lexical richness of sentences by using statistics and complexity indexes. Moreover, the readability and the intelligibility of the president speeches are analyzed for Malian people by use of statistical and graphical visualizing methods. Accordingly, this analysis measures the originality of the president’s spoken words response to Malian social context characterized by the weakness of the government authority, the increase of insecurity and terrorism, the corruption of the public finance workers and the deterioration of the economic indicators such as the youth unemployment, the lack of valuable creation by service and production industries and their consequences on the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the poverty index. To perform these analyses, the corpus is therefore transformed into Term Document Matrix (TDM), which is a contingency table between speech and word counts. These analyses underline that the president usually delivered speeches with a high complexity (similar to Marcel Proust text) whose message content is unintelligible and incomprehensible for most Malian.