Pandemic and Crisis Discourse: Communicating COVID-19 and Public Health Strategy

495 Pages·2022·6.053 MB·English

by  Andreas Musolff (editor), Ruth Breeze (editor), Kayo Kondo (editor), Sara Vilar-Lluch (editor)

LIST OF FIGURES
1.1 Distribution of summary variable scores 18
1.2 Comparison of WHO and CMFA summary variables scores 20
1.3 Interpolated time plots of WHO and CMFA variable scores 27
1.4 Observed vs. predicted time plot for CMFA (Authentic) 28
2.1 Top part of the homepage of WHO website 37
2.2 Bottom part of the homepage of WHO website 39
2.3 Further subtopics and hyperlinks to the link ‘Advice for the public’ 40
2.4 Further subtopics and hyperlinks to the link ‘Country & Technical Guide’ 41
2.5 WHO Homepage’s interactive timeline on WHO’s Covid-19 response 42
2.6 WHO Homepage’s Covid-19 interactive dashboard 42
7.1 #Lancsbox 5.2.1 KWIC tool retrieval of the target coronavirus in
the corpus 119
7.2 #Lancsbox 5.2.1 GraphColl tool retrieval of the most frequent
co-occurrences of the target coronavirus 120
7.3 Community Heroes, page 5 © 2020 by Sarah Rose Lyons 125
7.4 Coronavirus Get Outta Here! Page 9 © 2020 by Peter Ivey and
Andrew Blake 125
7.5 King Covid and the Kids Who Cared. Pages 10 and 19 © 2020
by Nicole Rim 126
7.6 King Covid and the Kids Who Cared. Pages 10 and 19 © 2020
by Nicole Rim 127
7.7 #COVIBOOK. Page 7 © 2020 Manuela Molina 128
7.8 Staying home. Page 5 © 2020 by Viviane Schwarz 129
8.1 Conceptual scene of LL signs 138
8.2 Sign instantiating the RULE schema. Coronavirus: General safety measures
(photo: N.M., Landau) 139
8.3 Sign instantiating the RULE schema in a specific place and group of
addresses (photo: N.M., Landau) 140
LIST OF FIGURES ix
8.4 Sign instantiating the WARNING schema combined with the RULE schema 142
8.5 Mural instantiating the WARNING schema (artist: Ivan Lee) 143
8.6 Sign instantiating the ORIENTATION schema (photo: N.M., Landau) 144
8.7 Handwritten sign instantiating the OFFER schema (photo: N.M., Landau) 145
8.8 Sign instantiating the OFFER and RULE schema (Photo: N.M., Landau) 146
8.9 Non-commercial sign instantiating the OFFER schema 147
8.10 Roise the Riveter 148
8.11 ‘Alles wird gut!’ sign in Landau (photo: N.M., Landau) 149
8.12a OPINION schema instantiated on a mask (photo: N.M., Landau) 150
8.12b OPINION schema instantiated on a building (photo: F.P., Heidelberg) 150
8.13 Drei große ??? sticker (at the courtesy of Martin Lange, Landau) 151
8.14 Vaccination in the LL (Berlin) 152
8.15 Intertextuality and the ‘Neinhorn’ (photo: N.M., Landau) 154
8.16a, b Church boards, Maine 155
8.17 Localization: Dialectal forms (photo: F.P., Heidelberg) 156
8.18 Localization: Local categories 157
8.19 Context-dependent advertisement Hohes C. (photo: F.P., Heidelberg) 158
8.20 Repurposing (photo: F.P., Heidelberg) 159
8.21 ‘My precious!’ corona-related street art (Berlin, Mauerpark) 160
8.22 Lord of the Rings meets Ice Age. Corona-related street art
(Berlin, Mauerpark) 161
12.1 Diachronic Changes of WAR Metaphors in the Corpus 236
12.2 The development of Covid-19 in Hong Kong 236
20.1 Number of reporters assigned and stories covered from 31 March to
7 April, 2020 (Times of India) 360
20.2 Number of reporters assigned and stories covered from 31 March to
7 April, 2020 (Dainik Jagran) 364
20.3 Page-wise number of stories published by Times of India and Dainik Jagran
from 31 March to 7 April 2020 367
23.1 Overview of the prominent features 419
24.1 Summary of Dr Mike’s Instagram posts over the period of study 435
LIST OF TABLES
1.1 Summary variables and defining lexical categories 15
1.2 Summary variables and interpretation 16
1.3 Descriptive statistics of summary variable scores 19
1.4 Baseline summary variable scores in other genres 19
1.5 Summary of time series modelling outcomes 26
6.1 Elements in explainer webpages 101
6.2 Strategies to make content comprehensible 103
6.3 Strategies to engage the reader 106
6.4 Strategies to achieve credibility 109
7.1 List of books making up the corpus under study 118
7.2 Target retrieval and metaphorical mappings per target 124
9.1 Frequencies of I, you and we across the three corpora 174
9.2 LWT corpus ordered by date of publication 181
9.3 Top 20 LWT keywords with the BNC 2014 Baby+ as a reference 182
9.4 Common keywords among CNN and BBC, ordered by frequency in LWT 183
10.1 Overview of attitude types 187
10.2 Examples of conceptual metaphors 189
10.3 Overview of the linguistic corpus 189
10.4 Overview of the distribution of concordances across the pandemic stages 193
10.5 Keywords Spanish corpus 194
10.6 Keywords English corpus 197
10.7 Representation of Covid-19 in the Spanish corpus 199
10.8 Representation of Covid-19 in the English corpus 201
11.1 The quantitative distribution of metaphorical scenarios and domains
for Covid-19 211
12.1 Details of the corpus 228
LIST OF TABLES xi
12.2 List of top five source domains 230
12.3 Cross-tabulation of SOURCE DOMAIN and EMOTIONAL VALENCE 231
12.4 The frequency of topics for WAR metaphors 234
12.5 Distribution of WAR metaphors in the corpus 235
16.2.1 Semantic fields in Greek data 303
16.2.2 Semantic fields in French data 304–5
16.2.3 Semantic fields in German data 305–6
18.1 Attitudes towards ‘Chinese virus’ discourse from YouTube comments 327
19.1 Statistical information from posts 344
19.2 Statistical information from comments 345
21.1 Distribution of words related to pandemic terms among the most
frequent words (lemmas) and among the most frequent specific words
(lemmas) 379
21.2 Words related to pandemic among the 100 most frequent specific
words (lemmas) after crossing Slovenian corpora with the Slovenian
reference corpus and Italian corpora with the Italian reference corpus 380–1
21.3 Distribution of modifiers acting as intensifiers or mitigators in
the six media corpora 383
21.4 Intensity modifiers acting as intensifiers or mitigators in the six
media corpora 384
23.1 Corpus size of the data 416
23.2 Analytical categories of doctors’ responses, definitions and examples 417–19
23.3 The full details of the instances of the components from the analysis 420
26.1 Post-cabinet press conferences held by Jacinda Ardern in March
and April 2020 472
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Karin Andersson is a PhD student within the sociology of sport and linguistics at the
University of Ghent, Belgium. She has worked as a Lecturer at the University of Vienna.
She is also currently a research assistant at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and at the
department of sports at Malmö University, Sweden.
Jesper Andreasson has a PhD in Sociology and is Associate Professor in sport science at
the Department of sport science, Linnaeus University, Sweden. Andreasson has extensive
experience of working with ethnography and different internet methods. He has written
extensively within the area of doping, gym/fitness culture, carnalizing sociology and gender
theory. He is in charge of a 120-credit master’s degree programme in sport science and
teaches at the graduate and postgraduate levels, mainly in the areas of research methods,
sport science and social theory.
Fabienne H. Baider graduated from the University of Toronto and is Professor at the
University of Cyprus in the French and European Studies Department. She works on
semantics and discourse analysis from a socio-cognitivist perspective. Her work has been
published in various peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Pragmatics and Pragmatics
and Society. She co-directed several special issues and volumes, whether in discourse and
gender ideology or in linguistic approaches to emotions. Her present research focused on
online discourse and discriminatory practices. She also coordinated the EU Social Justice
program CONTACT; she is partner in two others SHELTER and IMsyPP, all focused
on hate speech/hate crime; she coordinates the UCY program HOPE focused on counter
narrative.
Melike Baş is Assistant Professor of Linguistics in the Department of English Language
Teaching, Amasya University, Turkey. She teaches courses in general and applied linguistics
at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Her primary research interest is on cognitive
semantics, with a focus on conceptual metaphor theory, cultural conceptualizations
and embodiment of emotions. She is the editor of the volume Contemporary Studies in
Turkish Semantics (2021).
Ruth Breeze is Associate Professor of English at the University of Navarra, Spain, and PI
of the Public Discourse Research Group in the Instituto Cultura y Sociedad. Her most
recent books are Corporate Discourse (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) and the co-edited
volumes Power, Persuasion and Manipulation in Specialised Genres (2017), and Imagining
the Peoples of Europe: Populist Discourses across the Political Spectrum (2019).
Theresa Catalano holds a PhD in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching from the
University of Arizona and is currently Associate Professor of Second Language Education/
Applied Linguistics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her research is grounded in
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS xiii
critical discourse studies, social semiotics and cognitive linguistics and focuses on social
inequality and its relation to language/visual communication. In addition, she studies
language education (including the arts) and migration and publishes across a wide range
of journals such as Discourse & Society, Bilingual Research Journal, Critical Inquiry in
Language Studies and Teaching and Teacher Education.
Emily Chiang is Research Assistant at Lingnan University.
Maria Constantinou is an invited Assistant Professor at the University of Cyprus and
an experienced professional translator. She is particularly interested in issues related to
metaphors, ideology, emotions, humour, discourse, society and identity construction. She
has participated in various conferences and published several articles and chapters on (and
in) English, French and Greek mainly from a contrastive, cross-cultural and translational
perspective in prestigious collective volumes and peer-reviewed journals, including
Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, Social Semiotics, Intralinea, Perspectives,
Linguistica Antverpiensia, Studii de lingvistica and Studia Romanica Posnaniensia. She is
guest co-editor of a special issue (47) on hate speech with the French journal SEMEN.
Marta Degani (PhD 2006, habilitation 2012) was appointed Associate Professor in English
language and linguistics at the University of Verona, Italy, in 2014, and currently also holds
a position as senior scientist of English linguistics at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria.
Her current research focuses on the analysis of political discourse in the frameworks of
cognitive semantics and critical discourse analysis and the study of varieties of English and
language contact in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand.
Tatjana Đurović is Professor of English at the Faculty of Economics, University of Belgrade.
Her research interests lie in applied cognitive linguistics, critical discourse analysis,
multimodality and English for specific purposes, and she has published extensively in these
areas. She contributed co-authored chapters to edited books published by John Benjamins
(in 2019) and Bloomsbury (in 2014). Her most recent work centres on the analysis of the
Covid-19 pandemic metaphors in Serbian and English public discourse. She is currently
associate editor of ESP Today – Journal of English for Specific Purposes at Tertiary Level.
Esranur Efeoğlu-Özcan is a PhD candidate in English Language Teaching Program
(Language Studies track) at Middle East Technical University (METU), Turkey. She
focused on metaphorical (re)conceptualization of Turkey in political discourse for her MA
thesis. She is currently investigating discursive dynamics of Turkish youth talk. Her works
primarily involve sociopragmatic investigation of interaction (spoken and written); her
research interests include discourse studies, corpus linguistics and conceptual metaphors.
She is the co-founder of Discourse and Corpus Research (DISCORE) Group at METU.
Dariusz Galasiński is Professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research into Health
and Illness, University of Wroclaw. His current research interests focus upon experience
of mental illness and suicide. Recent publications include Men’s Discourses of Depression
(2008), Fathers, Fatherhood and Mental Illness: A Discourse Analysis of Rejection (2013),
Discourses of Men’s Suicide Notes (2017, Bloomsbury) and Discursive Constructions of
the Suicidal Process with Justyna Ziółkowska (2020, Bloomsbury).
xiv LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Janet Ho is Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Lingnan University. Her
research interests lie in metaphor studies and critical discourse analysis. She has published
in journals including Metaphor and Symbol, Discourse Studies and Discourse, Context &
Media.
Haiyan Huang is a PhD candidate in the Translation, Interpreting and Communication
Department and Language and Culture Department, Gent University. She is interested
in exploring sociopolitical transformations in contemporary China. To be more specific,
her research interests involve exploring the construction of nationalism, women
representations and (anti-)feminism. With education background rooted in language
and sociolinguistics, Huang mainly adopts qualitative research method, such as digital
ethnography, critical discourse analysis and narrative as social practice.
Geert Jacobs is Professor of English for Specific Purposes and Business Discourse at the
Department of Linguistics at Ghent University. He has researched wide-ranging forms of
institutional interaction, including the discourse of news production. He is the head of
the international NewsTalk&Text research group and currently serves as President of the
worldwide Association for Business Communication (ABC).
Lee Jarvis is Professor of International Politics at the University of East Anglia, UK.
His work focuses on the construction and communication of security threats, and the
implications thereof for social and political life. Lee is author or editor of fourteen books
and over fifty articles or chapters, including Times of Terror: Discourse, Temporality and
the War on Terror; Security: A Critical Introduction (with Jack Holland); and Banning
Them, Securing Us? Terrorism, Parliament and the Ritual of Proscription (with Tim
Legrand). His work has been funded by the ESRC, the AHRC, the Australian Research
Council, NATO and others.
María José Luzón is Senior Lecturer (PhD) at the Department of English and German
Studies (University of Zaragoza), where she teaches courses on academic English, and
on English Language Teaching. She has published extensively on English for Academic
Purposes, genre analysis, academic writing by multilingual scholars, and online academic
genres. Her current research focuses on the analysis of digital genres for science
communication and dissemination.
Themis P. Kaniklidou is Associate Professor of Translation and Communication and
Associate Provost at Hellenic American University. Her research interests include
translation, translation and narrative, discourse analysis, political communication and
metaphor analysis.
Aaquib Khan is an independent journalist, currently based in Mumbai, India. Over his
nearly nine-year journalism career as a reporter and researcher he has reported on conflict,
politics, human rights, refugees, environmental issues from Afghanistan, Bangladesh,
Nepal, Sri Lanka and Germany. His reports were published extensively in different
national and international reputed publications worldwide.
Kayo Kondo is currently a Research Associate at the School of Education, Communication
and Language Sciences at Newcastle University, and is also a Postdoctoral Visiting Fellow
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS xv
at University of East Anglia. Her research has considered theories of patient-centredness,
empathy in medical and healthcare settings, and clinical interactions between older
patients and health professionals.
Vesna Mikolič, Full Professor, is a Chair of the Institute for Linguistic Studies at the ZRS
Koper (Slovenia) and a member of the Department of Slovenian Studies at the University of
Trieste (Italy). Her research topics cover intercultural education, intercultural pragmatics,
semantics and discourse analysis in science, tourism and literature. She is the author of
more than 450 publications, including monographs Language in the Mirror of Cultures,
Tourism Discourse, Ethnic Identity and Intercultural Awareness in Contemporary
Language Teaching, and Intensity Modification in the Slovenian Language. She has been a
visiting professor at the universities in Canada, the United States, EU, Japan, Russia and
the former Yugoslavia.
María Muelas-Gil is Lecturer in Cognitive Linguistics, Pragmatics, Semantics and Second
Language Acquisition at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain). She holds an
international PhD (2018) by the UAM and the Universidade Catolica Portugesa (Braga,
Portugal). While doing her doctoral research, she worked as a part-time teacher at the
Faculty of Education of the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, where she taught English
Didactics. She has focused her research on conceptual and multimodal metaphor analysis
in different discourses, including economy, politics and health, but also on second
language acquisition and foreign language didactics as a second research path.
Neele Mundt is Lecturer in English linguistics at the University of Koblenz-Landau,
Germany. She works in the field of sociolinguistics with a focus on English in central Africa.
She spent one year in Yaoundé, where she collected field data for her research project
situated at the juncture of (cognitive) sociolinguistics and linguistic landscape studies in
Cameroon. Her research interests include multilingualism, (cognitive) sociolinguistics
and applied linguistics in general, and with a focus on Africa in particular.
Andreas Musolff is Professor of Intercultural Communication at the University of
East Anglia (Norwich, UK). His research interests focus on Metaphor Studies and
Intercultural communication. His most recent publications include the volumes National
Conceptualisations of the Body Politic (2021) and (coedited) Migration and Media.
Discourses about Identities in Crisis (2019).
Mariana Neagu is Professor of English Linguistics at ‘Dunărea de Jos’ University of Galați,
Romania, where she teaches Phonology, Semantics, Aspects of Style in Translation,
Primary and Secondary Sources in Scientific Research. She is co-editor of Translation
Studies: Retrospective and Prospective Views and is the author of numerous books
(Cognitive Linguistics. An Introduction, 2005) and research articles on cognitive linguistics
(What Is Universal and What Is Language-specific in the Polysemy of Perception Verbs)
and translating and is a reviewer for international peer reviewed journals (Language,
Individual and Society). Her present research interests include figurative language in the
literary and political discourses.
Alexandra-Angeliki Papamanoli is a lawyer and a freelance translator based in Athens.
She holds an MA in Translation awarded by the Hellenic American University and a BA in
xvi LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Law from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Her research interests include Political
Language, Discourse Analysis, Metaphor Theory and Translation: English-Greek.
Frank Polzenhagen (PhD 2007, habilitation 2014) is chair professor for English Linguistics
at the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany. Much of his work has been devoted to the
study of second-language varieties of English from a cognitive-sociolinguistic and cultural-
linguistic perspective. His publications in this field include Cultural Conceptualisations
in West African English (2007) and World Englishes: A Cognitive Sociolinguistic Approach
(2009, with Hans-Georg Wolf). Closely related is his work on the lexicographic
description of these varieties. He is co-editor of A Dictionary of Indian English (2017);
a comprehensive dictionary of West African English is in preparation (with Hans-Georg
Wolf and Lothar Peter).
Amir H. Y. Salama is currently Associate Professor of Linguistics in the Department of
English, College of Social Science and Humanities in Al-Kharj, Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz
University, Saudi Arabia. Also, he is a standing Associate Professor of Linguistics in the
Faculty of Al-Alsun (Languages), Kafr El-Sheikh University, Egypt. In 2011, Dr Salama
got his PhD in linguistics from the Department of English at Lancaster University, UK.
Since then, he has published in international journals like Discourse & Society, Critical
Discourse Studies, Pragmatics & Society, Semiotica and Corpora. His research interests
are corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, translation studies, pragmatics, lexical semantics
and semiotics.
Stephanie Schnurr is Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics at the University of
Warwick. She has published widely on professional and medical communication. She is the
author of Leadership Discourse at Work (2009), Exploring Professional Communication
(2013), Language and Culture at Work (with O. Zayts, 2017), and The Language of
Leadership Narratives (with J. Clifton and D. van de Mieroop, 2019). She has also co-
edited several research collections on different aspects of professional communication.
Kim Schoofs is Post-Doctoral Researcher at KU Leuven, Belgium. In her PhD (2020)
she explored new ways of uncovering the dialectic relation between the local-discursive
construction of identities and master narratives in the social context. Kim’s main research
interests cover identity work in narrative and interactional data, networked narratives on
social media and persuasive communication.
Nadežda Silaški is Professor of English for Economists at the Faculty of Economics,
University of Belgrade. Her research interests focus on metaphor studies, public discourse
analysis, multimodality and English for specific purposes. She is currently interested in
the role of figurative language in crisis management discourse. She has published in
international journals such as Ibérica, Metaphor and the Social World, Discourse, Context
& Media, English Today, and has contributed co-authored chapters to volumes published
by John Benjamins, Routledge and Bloomsbury. She is editor-in-chief of ESP Today –
Journal of English for Specific Purposes at Tertiary Level.
Anastasia Stavridou is a third-year PhD candidate in Applied Linguistics at the Department
of Applied Linguistics, University of Warwick. Her PhD explores the discursive construction
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS xvii
of leadership and followership as conceptualized among the players of a basketball team.
Her research interests include leadership and followership, sports communication, identity
construction, professional communication and topics in sociolinguistics. As member of the
Sports Culture and Communication Research Collective, she has co-authored two studies
on the communication of boxing coaches under pressure and on the processes of emergent
leadership in a netball team.
Dennis Tay is Associate Professor at the Department of English and Communication,
the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He is Co-Editor of Metaphor and the Social
World, Associate Editor of Metaphor and Symbol, and an Academic Editor of PLOS One.
His interests include metaphor, mental healthcare communication and the statistical
modelling of discourse.
Dorien Van De Mieroop is Associate Professor at KU Leuven, Belgium. Her main research
interests lie in the discursive analysis of institutional interactions and of narratives, about
which she published more than thirty articles in international peer-reviewed journals,
edited a volume with Stephanie Schnurr on Identity Struggles (2017) and co-authored
two books (with Jonathan Clifton on Master Narratives, Identities, and the Stories of
Former Slaves (2016), and with Jonathan Clifton and Stephanie Schnurr on The Language
of Leadership Narratives (2020)). She is co-editor of the journal Narrative Inquiry (John
Benjamins).
Sara Vilar-Lluch completed a PhD in Linguistics at the University of East Anglia (2020)
and is currently a Spanish Language Tutor at the Modern Language Centre, King’s
College London. Her research interests are in Systemic Functional Linguistics, metaphor
analysis, health communication and (critical) discourse analysis.
Ulrike Vogl is Assistant Professor at the Department of Linguistics of Ghent University,
Belgium. Her research focus is on historical sociolinguistics, pragmatics, language ideology
and critical discourse analysis. Since 2019, she collaborates on an interdisciplinary
research project on the changing professional identity of group fitness instructors with a
specific focus on the Covid-19 pandemic.
Peiwen Wang is currently a doctoral student in the Department of Teaching, Learning,
and Teacher Education at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her primary areas of
interest in research include (multimodal) critical discourse studies, teacher education that
advances equity, and intercultural studies.
Professor Emeritus Dr Daniel Weiss earned his PhD degree at the University of Zurich.
He held chairs of Slavic linguistics in Hamburg, Munich and Zurich. He has authored
more than 160 articles, one monograph and three book chapters, and edited four
collections of papers. His main current interests are the syntax of colloquial Russian and
the political discourse in contemporary Russia and Poland within a pragmatic framework.
His most important research projects investigated the history of verbal propaganda in the
Soviet Union and socialist Poland, implicit communicative strategies in Russian, Polish
and Czech political discourse and the Ukrainian conflict as a battlefield of competing
legitimization discourses.