syntactic complexity, presidential speeches, ideology, Czechoslovakia

Analyses of political speeches have a long-standing tradition in stylometry, with a particular focus on presidential addresses. While studies of US presidential speeches dominate the field (e.g. Liu 2012; Lim 2004; Savoy 2010, 2016), similar research has emerged for other nations, e.g. Italy (Tuzzi et al. 2010) or Russia (Kuznetsova 2016). This study examines New Year's presidential speeches from Czechoslovak and Czech presidents. These speeches, delivered annually, provide a unique opportunity for heads of state to address the nation, reflect on the past year, and outline their vision for the future. As a continuous genre spanning nearly a century, these speeches form a valuable corpus for studying both language change and historical trends. The Czechoslovak context introduces an additional ideological dimension to this corpus. Czechoslovakia was established as a democratic republic in 1918 following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy after World War I. After experiencing German Nazi occupation and a brief postwar democratic period, Czechoslovakia transitioned into a communist regime as one of the Soviet satellite states. The Velvet Revolution of 1989 marked the return of democracy, and the subsequent peaceful split in 1993 led to the formation of two independent countries, Czechia and Slovakia. This historical trajectory allows us to analyze the speeches through the lens of two contrasting ideologies –communism and democracy – and observe their impact on the linguistic structures of presidential discourse. While previous studies have primarily focused on the content, themes, and lexical stylometric features of these speeches such as lexical diversity, average word length, and text activity/descriptivity indices (Čech 2014; David et al. 2014; Jičinský & Marek 2017; Kubát et al. 2021), this study shifts the focus to the syntactic level. By applying methods for analyzing syntactic complexity, we offer a fresh perspective on the corpus. Specifically, we measure four indicators: average sentence length (in words and clauses), average clause length (in words), Mean Dependency Distance (MDD), and Mean Hierarchical Distance (MHD). These measures provide insights into the complexity and structural organization of presidential speeches across different historical and ideological contexts. The results reveal notable differences in syntactic complexity across the ideological contexts. Democratic speeches tend to have higher sentence length, as observed in the average sentence length in words and clauses. In contrast, communist-era speeches exhibit shorter sentences suggesting a more constrained style. Additionally, longer clauses during the communist period compared to the democratic periods, indicating a shift in the internal organization of sentences. Mean Dependency Distance (MDD) and Mean Hierarchical Distance (MHD) reveal further structural differences: democratic speeches display greater syntactic depth and larger dependency distance, while communist speeches maintain a flatter structure and a smaller dependency distance. In general, democratic speeches demonstrate a higher syntactic complexity by comparison to communist speeches.