The Zapatista Semantic Struggle: Analysing the Linguistic Innovation of the EZLN with Semantic Difference Keywords (SDKs)

This paper extracts Semantic Difference Keywords (SDKs) from the discourse issued by the EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation), a contemporary Mexican social movement, by comparing it to a comparison corpus comprising the discourse produced by other Latin American leftist insurgent movements from the Cuban Revolution onwards. SDKs are keywords selected because of a comparatively high semantic difference between their uses in two or more corpora. These semantic differences point to areas of semantic contestation between the corpora. In this study, SDKs are extracted from Word2Vec word embeddings. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it furthers the understanding of Zapatista discourse and the ways in which it distances itself from the Latin American guerrilla tradition. Results show that the Zapatistas redefine words belonging to the topics of insurgency, oppression and ideology. Notably, they reject the term 'revolution' and create semantic continuums between concepts whose meaning does not appear to be linked in the comparison corpus. For instance, capitalism becomes semantically associated with epistemological violence and the semantic boundaries between thoughts and actions become eroded. Finally, various terms underwent a process of 'subjectivisation', i.e. they acquired a strong correlation with the subjective experience of the communities issuing the discourse. Second, this study demonstrates the potential of SDKs in discourse studies and highlights the way in which semantic contestation can be better understood by observing the shift in semantic relations within word clusters rather than by observing target words in isolation.