Is it ‘the Ukraine crisis’ or a war in Europe? Multiple frames of Russia’s aggression in parliamentary discourse from a comparative MD-CADS perspective

This contribution aims to uncover similarities and differences in the construction of war in the Ukrainian and British parliamentary discourses against the dramatic social context of Russia’s unfolding aggression since 2014 and its full-scale invasion of Ukraine starting from 24 February 2022. The study adopts a comparative perspective on the onomasiological salience (Geeraerts, 2017) of alternative designations of armed hostilities used in comparable institutional settings. It is primarily situated within the framework of MD-CADS, with its emphasis on the importance of corpus data segmentation from epistemological, methodological and practical perspectives (Marchi, 2018). Naming choices for the armed hostilities in focus are discussed in relation to experience-based schematic representations of real-world situations known as frames (Fillmore et al., 2003a; Ruppenhofer et al., 2017) and framing as a discursive practice of selecting “some aspects of a perceived reality” (Entman, 1993: 52) and “introducing some form of cognitive bias” (Charteris-Black, 2019: 16) in parliamentary discourse, which provides valuable data for investigating the intersection between language and social change (Tyrkkö and Kotze, 2023). The data come from two uniformly encoded and comparable corpora under the ParlaMint project: ParlaMint-UA containing plenary proceedings of the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s unicameral parliament, and ParlaMint-GB including transcripts of parliamentary debates from the House of Lords and the House of Commons. The findings suggest that naming and framing of armed hostilities in parliamentary debates have to do with the hybrid legal and political nature of parliamentary discourse as well as an interplay between the institutional and individual choices of the speakers. Spatial and temporal proximity or distance between the speakers and the events in focus affects yet does not determine their conceptualisation as proximal or distant from the speakers themselves as well as from their addressees and is subject to change in the constantly shifting political and geopolitical climate.