Who was done what? A Corpus-based Study of Passive Voice Constructions in Media Discourse on the Russo-Ukrainian War
Creators: name: Natchanun, Sanitdee
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024

description: *Disclaimer: This is a draft version.

The Russo-Ukrainian War started on 20 February, 2014, but Russian invasion of Ukraine did not begin until 24 February 2022, when Russia launched a military invasion of Ukraine during the steep escalation of the conflict. Media and press do not merely serve the purpose of communicating events, but they have been used as the tool to propagate agenda and play a vital role in shaping the perspectives of the audience towards the events. This prompts scholars to investigate language use in news to examine linguistic phenomena underlined by political and ideological currents.

This project analyzes subject-verb pairs occurring under passive voice constructions in news corpora. Passive voice constructions play a crucial role in revealing how agency and actions are represented, especially in the discourse surrounding war and conflict, and this aspect has been underexplored in previous studies. Datasets include a web-crawled corpus based on the keywords Russian-Ukrainian War, Russo-Ukrainian War, Ukraine War, and Russia’s War in Ukraine using SketchEngine (Kilgarriff et al. 2014), as well as the more general news corpora, the Leipzig corpora collection (Goldhahn et al. 2012) in the category “News” from the years 2014 to 2020 and 2023. Comparing the passive subject-verb pairs from the two corpora, the study aims to answer the following research questions: i) What are the subject-verb pairs related to Russian and Ukrainian occurring in passive constructions? ii) How are they represented in both corpora? and iii) How do the occurrences change over time?

The parser, spaCy, is employed to process the texts and extract subjects and verbs of passive constructions based on the dependency tag “nsubjpass”. Limitations of spaCy parser, as well as the code script, involve numerical subjects, inherent subjects, hidden passive voice constructions, and compound subjects. A combination of qualitative and quantitative methods including frequency analysis, O/E score, t-score, p-value, semantic network, close-reading, and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is used to analyze the results.

The analysis reveals nine categories of passive subject-verb pairs: five for subjects (military, civilian, location, nominalization, and neutral) and four for verbs (harmful, restrictive, motion, and general). Four categories of proper noun subjects are identified: locations, people, organizations, as well as terms/concepts. The contextual news texts imply a malevolent image of Russia towards both Russian and foreign citizens in political, cultural, humanitarian, and international aspects. The analysis of proper nouns with corresponding verbs points out that Russian governmental and military officials, the UK and the US people, and Russian nationality are exempted from violent verbs. The analysis of the most frequently occurring pairs shows that even in general news corpora like the Leipzig news corpora, words related to civilian, violence, and restriction still appear in top ranks. The average O/E score, together with the percentage of passive pairs in a corpus, indicates that passive constructions are used more often in the Ukraine War corpus, but their occurrences are less significant than those in the Leipzig corpora. 

Examining the source links from which the web-crawled corpus is compiled raises the concern of the dominance of the Anglo-Saxon media as 85.5% of the sources are Anglo-Saxon media. Future studies may consider conducting a comparative analysis of passive voice constructions in non-Anglo-Saxon media sources to address potential asymmetries or biases in the representation of the conflict across different linguistic and cultural contexts.