The case for case in Putin’s speeches

Abstract

Vladimir V. Putin has banned the use of the word ‘war’ to refer to the conflict in Ukraine. While one’s choice of words is deliberate and conscious, grammatical categories are obligatory and pivotal to signaling the roles notions have in a discourse. Over- and underrepresentation of grammatical cases can be identified by Keymorph Analysis, which measures deviations from corpus norms analogously to Keyword Analysis. This first application of Keymorph Analysis to Russian data compares the use of grammatical case for the nouns meaning ‘Russia’, ‘Ukraine’, and ‘NATO’ in Putin’s speeches in the period leading up to and immediately after the invasion of Ukraine. Our analysis reveals a narrative in which Putin depicts Russia as a dynamic, agentive, foregrounded actor, a reliable partner for collaboration, but also the victim of unfair geopolitical maneuvers. Ukraine, by contrast, is dehumanized as relatively static and backgrounded, often merely a territorial location rather than a state. NATO appears primarily as the label for an untrustworthy organization and a destination for Ukraine.