الفهرس 
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Abstract
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a type of research that primarily scrutinizes how social power relations, dominance and inequality are enacted, reproduced and resisted by means of the text and talk of dominant groups or institutions. By adopting this approach to discourse analysis, the present study explores how written bureaucratic discursive practices involving clients and bureaucrats in the Egyptian community encode asymmetrical power relations, control and domination.
For this purpose a linguistic toolkit is used to analyze a corpus of 92 letters written by clients and bureaucrats. The corpus is examined pragmatically (e.g. politeness theory), lexically (e.g. terms of address) and syntactically (e.g. impersonalization mechanisms) by means of a CDA framework. The aim is to detect some of the discursive structures that lead to naturalized or no longer visible dominant ideological stances and manipulations adopted by both clients and bureaucrats.
The study is divided into three chapters. Chapter 1 offers definitions of the term ’bureaucracy’ and its related concepts, a general overview of the theory of critical discourse analysis and eventually the methodology adopted for the analysis of the corpus of letters. Chapters 2 and 3 examine critically client and bureaucrat letters respectively.
The results of this study provide insights into the complex network of relations that exist between bureaucratic discourse and power. The most important conclusion to be drawn from the analysis is that bureaucratic discourse is used as a tool of social inequality and control since bureaucrats distance themselves from clients and maintain the power and authority which constrain the clients’ freedom of action.