Framing War: A Corpus Analysis of Political Speeches on the Russo-Ukrainian War

This corpus-based research is conducted on data from two corpora: an English corpus, divided into two subcorpora (European English and American English), and an Italian corpus. These corpora consist of political speeches delivered by prominent figures, including U.S. President Joe Biden, European Council President Charles Michel, and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, during 2022 and 2023. The primary hypothesis proposes, that three different corpora – representing American, general European, and Italian cultures and languages – contain texts that employ different dominant frames to conceptualise the topic of the Russo-Ukrainian war. The choice of language and conceptual metaphors for describing humanitarian aid, moral binaries, historical background, and economic consequences likely varies in these three regions. The objective of this study is to analyse the main frames implied meanings, and inferences used in war discourse with reference to English and Italian political speeches about the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian conflict. Aspects of the study: discourse analysis to uncover underlying meanings and intentions of the speech; corpus analysis to systematically analyse large bodies of text and extract meaningful insights including quality and quantity lexis analysis; comparative analysis to find and highlight the linguistic changes over time; translation analysis to compare the linguistic choice for Italian and English texts to understand how different language nuances vary across different cultures.