Geometric Discursive Paths and the Geometry of Discourse

Abstract

This article proposes a text-analytic metric called geometric discursive paths: sequences of intermediate words that connect two anchor concepts in a vector space and are filtered by a dimensional-persistence criterion. The analysis compares, in separately trained spaces, the corpus of the 2024 São Paulo mayoral debates, treated as institutional discourse, and an online comments reference corpus used as a contrastive interlocutor. The study focuses on five politically relevant anchor pairs, interpreted qualitatively with support from a compact layer of recurrence evidence and robustness checks summarized in the article and detailed in supplementary material. The results indicate, in the analyzed pairs, a recurrent contrast: in the debate corpus, semantic transitions tend to be mediated by technical-administrative or institutional intermediaries; in the online reference corpus, they tend to pass through political actors, events, social antagonisms, and everyday economic chains. The article makes a double contribution: methodologically, it formalizes the concept of “geometric discursive paths”; analytically, it shows how this concept can be incorporated into Textual Linguistics without replacing discourse interpretation with computational techniques.