Grammatical Profiling and Responsibility Allocation in Wartime Discourse: A Critical Cognitive Analysis of Russian and Ukrainian Presidential Speeches in 2022

Abstract

Wartime presidential speeches enable national leaders to frame conflict, divide group boundaries, and assign conflict responsibilities. Though lexicalrhetoric tactics are widely discussed, grammatical structures’ cognitiveideological functions in shaping agency and blame attribution remain insufficiently studied. This corpusdriven criticalcognitive study examines 41 earlyphase 2022 RussiaUkraine conflict speeches by Putin and Zelensky (February 21-March 18, 2022). Based on the profile-base distinction in Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar, it analyzes active, passive, and nominalized constructions across two corpora. Findings reveal that the two leaders adopt totally different grammatical strategies in their wartime discourse. Putin heavily uses ODC-led active constructions and IDC-subjected agentless passives to construct Russia as an externalthreat victim. His use of nominalizations conceals Russian military agency so as to reframe military intervention as a defensive “operation” for legitimization. Zelensky uses grammatical structures in a more flexible way: actives realize accusation and domestic mobilization; passives assign blame and emphasize victim status; nominalizations encapsulate enemy atrocities while retaining Ukrainian agency via “defense” and “resistance”. This study offers empirical evidence for grammatical choices’ politicalcommunicative value, indicating that grammatical profiling is a subtle but powerful ideological tool in wartime discourse.