'Maidan Has Become Part of Ukrainian Identity': the Dynamics of Naming and Framing Civil Resistance in Parliamentary Discourse

This paper examines how civil resistance is constructed in parliamentary discourse, focussing on naming choices for the 2013-14 protests in Ukraine known as the Euromaidan, Revolution of Dignity, or Maidan, and their surrounding contexts in speeches by Ukrainian Members of Parliament and foreign guests in full-house sittings of the Ukrainian parliament from 2013 to 2023. Using metadata annotation in the newly created corpus of Ukrainian parliamentary proceedings under the ParlaMint project, the study explores the interplay between naming and framing the protests over time and across collective actors at different levels of data aggregation. The results indicate a decline in explicit references to the 2013-14 protests in Ukrainian parliamentary discourse, but each name in question follows its unique trajectory, showing variations in relative frequency and semantic preference. The study also discusses the limits of using these names interchangeably, considering their non-arbitrariness and word-building potential within the context of competing framings of the events by different political players.