Pandemic and Crisis Discourse: Communicating COVID-19 and Public Health Strategy 9781350232693, 9781350232730, 9781350232709

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
List of Contributors
Introduction: From declarations of war to denial to explanations: How global publics have coped with the Covid-19 pandemic
Part I: The discourse of authority in a global crisis: Who defines (if there is) a pandemic?
1 Covid-19 press conferences across time: World Health Organization vs. Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Dennis Tay
2 Exploring the multimodal representation of Covid-19 on the official homepage of World Health Organization (WHO): A social-semiotic approach Amir H. Y. Salama
3 Covid-19 representations in political statements: A corpus-based analysis Alexandra-Angeliki Papamanoli and Themis Kaniklidou
4 How autocrats cope with the corona challenge: Belarus vs. Russia Daniel Weiss
5 Counting coronavirus: Mathematical language in the UK response to Covid-19 Lee Jarvis
Part II: The discourse of crisis management: How is the public meant to understand the pandemic and how does it actually do so?
6 ‘Coronavirus explainers’ for public communication of science: Everything the public needs to know María José Luzón
7 Covid warriors: An analysis of the use of metaphors in children’s books to help them understand Covid-19 Muelas-Gil María
8 Corona in the linguistic landscape Neele Mundt and Frank Polzenhagen
9 Political comedy and the challenges of public communication during the Covid-19 crisis: A corpus-assisted study of Last Week Tonight’s coverage of the pandemic Virginia Zorzi
10 Social reaction to a new health threat: The perception of the Covid-19 health crisis by British and Spanish readerships Sara Vilar-Lluch
11 How to pass this exam? Dealing with Covid-19 through metaphors in Turkish online public discourse Melike Baş and Esranur Efeoğlu-Özcan
Part III: The discourse of ‘War’ against the pandemic: How to ‘Fight’ Covid-19?
12 When wars are good: Emotional unpacking anti-coronavirus measures through metaphors in HK press conferences Molly Xie Pan and Joanna Zhuoan Chen
13 Legitimizing a global fight for a shared future: A critical metaphor analysis of the reportage of Covid-19 in China Daily Yating Yu
14 Metaphoric framings of fighting Covid-19 in Romanian and English public speeches Mariana Neagu
15 From an invisible enemy to a football match with the virus: Adjusting the Covid-19 pandemic metaphors to political agendas in Serbian public discourse Nadežda Silaški and Tatjana Đurović
16 Are healthcare political responses gendered? A case study of several European leaders Fabienne Baider and Maria Constantinou
17 ‘War against Covid-19’: Is the pandemic management as war metaphor helpful or hurtful? Andreas Musolff
Part IV: The discourse of judgement and rivalry: Blaming other/s for the pandemic and comparing national performances
18 Social media, right-wing populism, and Covid-19: A multimodal critical discourse analysis of reactions to the ‘Chinese virus’ discourse Peiwen Wang and Theresa Catalano
19 ‘Those lunatic zombies’: The discursive framing of Wuhan lockdown escapees in digital space Janet Ho and Emily Chiang
20 Identity as crime: How Indian mainstream media’s coverage demonized Muslims as coronavirus spreaders Aaqib Khan
21 Comparing Slovenian and Italian media discourse in the cross-border area during Covid-19 Vesna Mikolič
Part V: The discourse of empathy and encouragement: How to foster solidarity among doctors, patients and health experts
22 Conversations? Representations of CPR communication in the Covid-19 pandemic Dariusz Galasiński and Justyna Ziółkowska
23 Doctors’ empathy and compassion in online health consultations during the Covid-19 pandemic in Japan Kayo Kondo
24 ‘Masks aren’t comfortable or sexy, but … ’: Exploring identity work on Dr Mike’s Instagram during the first phase of the Covid-19 pandemic Kim Schoofs, Dorien Van De Mieroop, Stephanie Schnurr, Haiyan Huang and Anastasia Stavridou
25 Choosing to stay fit? Glocalized ideologies of health and fitness during a pandemic Ulrike Vogl, Geert Jacobs, Karin Andersson and Jesper Andreasson
26 ‘Unite against COVID-19’: Jacinda Ardern’s discursive approach to the pandemic Marta Degani
Index

Citation preview

PANDEMIC AND CRISIS DISCOURSE

Also available from Bloomsbury Applying Linguistics in Illness and Healthcare Contexts, edited by Zsófia Demjén Contemporary Critical Discourse Studies, edited by Christopher Hart and Piotr Cap Corpus, Discourse and Mental Health, by Daniel Hunt and Gavin Brookes Political Metaphor Analysis, by Andreas Musolff The Bloomsbury Handbook of Discourse Analysis, edited by Ken Hyland, Brian Paltridge and Lillian Wong

PANDEMIC AND CRISIS DISCOURSE

COMMUNICATING COVID-19 AND PUBLIC HEALTH STRATEGY Edited by Andreas Musolff, Ruth Breeze, Kayo Kondo and Sara Vilar-Lluch

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Andreas Musolff, Ruth Breeze, Kayo Kondo, Sara Vilar-Lluch and Contributors, 2022 Andreas Musolff, Ruth Breeze, Kayo Kondo and Sara Vilar-Lluch have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Musolff, Andreas, editor. | Breeze, Ruth, editor. | Kondo, Kayo, editor. | Vilar-Lluch, Sara, editor. Title: Pandemic and crisis discourse : communicating COVID-19 and public health strategy / edited by Andreas Musolff, Ruth Breeze, Kayo Kondo and Sara Vilar-Lluch. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021038593 (print) | LCCN 2021038594 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350232693 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350232709 (pdf) | ISBN 9781350232716 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: COVID-19 (Disease) | COVID-19 (Disease)–Political aspects. | Public health. | Public relations. | Crisis management. Classification: LCC RA644.C67 P364 2022 (print) | LCC RA644.C67 (ebook) | DDC 616.2/414–dc23/eng/20211020 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021038593 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021038594 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-3269-3 ePDF: 978-1-3502-3270-9 eBook: 978-1-3502-3271-6 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

L ist L ist L ist

of of of

F igures  T ables  C ontributors 

Introduction: From declarations of war to denial to explanations: How global publics have coped with the Covid-19 pandemic

viii x xii 1

Part I: The discourse of authority in a global crisis: Who defines (if there is) a pandemic? 1 Covid-19 press conferences across time: World Health Organization vs. Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Dennis Tay

13

2 Exploring the multimodal representation of Covid-19 on the official homepage of World Health Organization (WHO): A social-semiotic approach Amir H. Y. Salama

31

3 Covid-19 representations in political statements: A corpus-based analysis Alexandra-Angeliki Papamanoli and Themis Kaniklidou

47

4 How autocrats cope with the corona challenge: Belarus vs. Russia Daniel Weiss

61

5 Counting coronavirus: Mathematical language in the UK response to Covid-19 Lee Jarvis

79

Part II: The discourse of crisis management: How is the public meant to understand the pandemic and how does it actually do so? 6 ‘Coronavirus explainers’ for public communication of science: Everything the public needs to know María José Luzón 7 Covid warriors: An analysis of the use of metaphors in children’s books to help them understand Covid-19 Muelas-Gil María 8 Corona in the linguistic landscape Neele Mundt and Frank Polzenhagen

97

115 135

vi

CONTENTS

9 Political comedy and the challenges of public communication during the Covid-19 crisis: A corpus-assisted study of Last Week Tonight’s coverage of the pandemic Virginia Zorzi

167

10 Social reaction to a new health threat: The perception of the Covid-19 health crisis by British and Spanish readerships Sara Vilar-Lluch

185

11 How to pass this exam? Dealing with Covid-19 through metaphors in Turkish online public discourse Melike Baş and Esranur Efeoğlu-Özcan

207

Part III: The discourse of ‘War’ against the pandemic: How to ‘Fight’ Covid-19? 12 When wars are good: Emotional unpacking anti-coronavirus measures through metaphors in HK press conferences Molly Xie Pan and Joanna Zhuoan Chen

225

13 Legitimizing a global fight for a shared future: A critical metaphor analysis of the reportage of Covid-19 in China Daily Yating Yu

241

14 Metaphoric framings of fighting Covid-19 in Romanian and English public speeches Mariana Neagu

255

15 From an invisible enemy to a football match with the virus: Adjusting the Covid-19 pandemic metaphors to political agendas in Serbian public discourse Nadežda Silaški and Tatjana Đurović

271

16 Are healthcare political responses gendered? A case study of several European leaders Fabienne Baider and Maria Constantinou

285

17 ‘War against Covid-19’: Is the pandemic management as war metaphor helpful or hurtful? Andreas Musolff

307

Part IV: The discourse of judgement and rivalry: Blaming other/s for the pandemic and comparing national performances 18 Social media, right-wing populism, and Covid-19: A multimodal critical discourse analysis of reactions to the ‘Chinese virus’ discourse Peiwen Wang and Theresa Catalano

323

19 ‘Those lunatic zombies’: The discursive framing of Wuhan lockdown escapees in digital space Janet Ho and Emily Chiang

339

CONTENTS

vii

20 Identity as crime: How Indian mainstream media’s coverage demonized Muslims as coronavirus spreaders Aaqib Khan

355

21 Comparing Slovenian and Italian media discourse in the cross-border area during Covid-19 Vesna Mikolič

375

Part V: The discourse of empathy and encouragement: How to foster solidarity among doctors, patients and health experts 22 Conversations? Representations of CPR communication in the Covid-19 pandemic Dariusz Galasiński and Justyna Ziółkowska

397

23 Doctors’ empathy and compassion in online health consultations during the Covid-19 pandemic in Japan Kayo Kondo

411

24 ‘Masks aren’t comfortable or sexy, but … ’: Exploring identity work on Dr Mike’s Instagram during the first phase of the Covid-19 pandemic Kim Schoofs, Dorien Van De Mieroop, Stephanie Schnurr, Haiyan Huang and Anastasia Stavridou

431

25 Choosing to stay fit? Glocalized ideologies of health and fitness during a pandemic Ulrike Vogl, Geert Jacobs, Karin Andersson and Jesper Andreasson

453

26 ‘Unite against COVID-19’: Jacinda Ardern’s discursive approach to the pandemic Marta Degani

471

I ndex 

487

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).

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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

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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 culturallinguistic 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 coedited 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

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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.

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Molly Xie Pan is Lecturer at College of Foreign Languages and Literature, Fudan University. She is interested in applying metaphor theories into professional communication, including political speeches, advertising and second language acquisition. Yating Yu is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of English, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and a member of the Research Centre for Professional Communication in English (RCPCE). Her research interests are in gender studies, corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis and metaphor studies. She has previously published in SSCI-indexed journals such as Social Semiotics, Gender and Language, and Feminist Media Studies. Joanna Zhuoan Chen is a PhD student in the Department of English at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research interests include metaphor theory, corpus linguistics and discourse studies. Justyna Ziółkowska is Associate Professor in psychology, University of Social Sciences and Humanities (SWPS), Poland. Justyna’s research focuses around discourse analysis of medical practices and experiences of mental problems. At present, she is studying representations of suicidal thoughts and attempt in individual and institutional discourses, with a particular focus on how patients construct their suicidal experiences, and how they are represented in medical documentation. Her latest monograph is Discursive Constructions of the Suicidal Process with Dariusz Galasiński (2020, Bloomsbury). Virginia Zorzi is Adjunct Instructor of English language and linguistics at the University of Turin. Her research and publications are situated within the fields of applied linguistics, discourse analysis and sociology, and her work chiefly draws on methods related to corpus linguistics. She is particularly interested in the public communication of science and technology in relation to their role and development within society. Her work has also covered the representation of scientific controversies through language, populist political communication, the discourse of and about conspiracy theories and the connection between language and gender.

Introduction: From declarations of war to denial to explanations: How global publics have coped with the Covid-19 pandemic This book aims to shed light on how different national and cultural communities across the world have dealt with the Covid-19 pandemic since its inception at the start of 2020. The public debates about the pandemic have articulated a vast range of critical reflections on communication: agenda-setting, categorization and metaphorization of the illness and the administrative responses to it, perceived ‘performances’ of specific governments and administrations in dealing with it, as well as empathy (and lack of it) in the communication of doctors, carers, patients, patients’ relatives, public services and further social institutions involved in dealing with the crisis.1 Furthermore, reflections on pandemic-related communication have themselves become part of managing the health crisis and have become objects of fierce debate, e.g. about the appropriateness of specific communicative styles, information (mis-)management and political ‘framing’.2 To attempt providing a comprehensive overview of these debates would be premature, as the pandemic is still raging at the time of writing (spring 2021). The present volume pursues a more modest task: we put forward exemplary case studies of key aspects in the ‘discourse history’ (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009) of public debates during the first year of the pandemic: ●●

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How was the pandemic, its official existence and nature, defined and categorized at national and international level? How has the public been guided to understand the pandemic, and how does this guidance work? Why and how has the management of the pandemic been imagined as a war – and what implications does the use of this conceptual metaphor have for the course of the debate? How are the intra- and inter-national conflicts and rivalries that arise from the pandemic articulated? How do nation-states, health institutions and non-governmental organizations foster solidarity and conflict resolution in the context of the pandemic?

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The twenty-six studies in this volume approach these questions with a mix of methods drawn from Discourse Analysis, Systemic Functional Linguistics and Cognitive Metaphor Theory, but also from Political and Media Theories, within an overarching discoursehistorical approach that aims at an integration of linguistic, social and historical insights, so as to arrive at an in-depth ‘triangulation’ of the impact of language use in its sociohistorical context (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009). This orientation also implies a corpusbased approach to the primary linguistic data; that is, every study is based on a set of documented texts that are transparently delineated, so as to allow for exemplary qualitative, in some cases also for quantitative, analyses that can be related to social and political science–based hypotheses. As the pandemic is still ongoing, the analyses are of necessity open-ended. They do not aim at giving definitive assessments of whether or how particular communicative initiatives have succeeded in shaping the public’s experience of the pandemic, but rather provide insights into the main trends and allow the formulation of plausible scenarios for further developments. In part I we look at definitions and framings of the pandemic in its early stages, particularly its official announcement as a threat to public health by the World Health Organization (WHO) and national governments. In the first contribution, Dennis Tay compares the English language press conferences by the WHO and the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (CMFA) from January to May 2020. In the first, quantitative, part Tay profiles the discursive manifestations of analytical thinking, authenticity, clout and emotional tone and their shifts across time, and concludes that whilst both the WHO and CMFA press conferences generally construe issues positively, the former displays significantly higher clout and authenticity but lower analyticity than the latter. Together with the results of exemplary qualitative analyses of Q&A turns at the press conferences, these findings point to underlying ideological differences in the respective types of public presentation of health-administrative ‘authority’ in the pandemic context. Chapter 2, by Amir Salama, homes in on the WHO’s multimodal discourse on Covid-19 as represented on the WHO’s official website, using the Social Semiotics approach pioneered by Kress and van Leeuwen (Kress, 2010; Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001, 2006). By analysing in detail the hyperlink organization of the Web presentation and the interplay of textual and pictorial modes at discourse, genre and layout level, the author shows how the WHO construes and fixes both the pandemic and its own public status in terms of agency and authority. In the third chapter Alexandra-Angeliki Papamanoli and Themis Kaniklidou use a corpus of fifty-four statements by international political leaders on Covid-19, collected from the New York Times online edition in March 2020, to elucidate methods of framing ownership, causation and responsibility for pandemic management, including the use of metaphors based on the source domains of speed, body, plant and vehicle. They conclude that in most countries, Covid-19 was presented either as an enemy of the state or as an urgent, but temporary, medical emergency, which motivated narratives of personal responsibility and the protection of public health set up against democracy and civil liberties. Daniel Weiss, in Chapter 4, focuses on the highly specific categorization of Covid-19 and related arguments in the leadership discourses of two post-Soviet nations, i.e. Russia and Belarus, which exhibit partially contrasting approaches to crisis management. While the Russian government came to fully recognize the pandemic danger relatively quickly and then installed rigorous lockdowns, the Belarusian leader Lukashenko at first denied and belittled the threat, using folk wisdom and religion as ‘authorities’, and for much longer excluded restrictive measures on economic grounds. A common feature

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of both government discourses is the lack – and suspected concealment – of reliable statistical information about national infection and fatalities numbers. In the UK, by contrast, governmental discourse on the pandemic relied heavily on quantifying not only the rise in infections and victims but also the state’s response in terms of testing, successful treatments, civic responses and financial commitments, which Lee Jarvis analyses in Chapter 5. He concludes that the pervasive use of ‘mathematical language’ in ministers’ policy announcements speeches and press releases, to demonstrate maximum transparency, serves a number of functions that range from ‘updating’ the public to reassurances about the national health system’s commitment to ‘beat the virus’, justifying governmental decisions as being ‘objectively’ necessary and thus establishing authority. The second part of this volume brings together chapters on the discourse of crisis management, and the guidance given to the public to shape their understanding of the pandemic. These chapters address the multiple ways in which governments, health authorities and other actors endeavoured to explain Covid-19 to different audiences, bringing to light a wide range of different messages and communicative strategies. In Chapter 6, ‘“Coronavirus explainers” for public communication of science: Everything the public needs to know’, María José Luzón looks in depth at ‘explainers’, that is, texts published by mainstream news media, scientific journals or specific ‘explainer’ websites intended to help readers understand news stories, usually by providing background information or clarifying specialized concepts. She shows how coronavirus explainers clearly have a twofold aim; that is, they are intended not only to satisfy the general public’s need for information on the Covid-19 pandemic, but also to engage this public as active agents in fighting the virus. For this reason, they often also incorporate features of persuasive and advisory discourse, including a combination of different modes (textual, visual, interactive), interpersonal address simulating dialogue (we, you), and pressing language (lexical choices indicating the seriousness of the situation) to convey a sense of urgency and importance. Unlike, say, news about the pandemic, which presents events impersonally, explainers focus on the implications for readers, that is, how Covid-19 may affect their lives, and what measures should be taken to reduce risk. Luzón concludes that explainers in situations of health risk should be regarded as distinct from some other types of explainer (e.g. in economic news), in that they prioritize the public health message and encourage people to take an active role in their own healthcare. Chapter 7, ‘Covid Warriors: An analysis of the use of metaphors in children’s books to help them understand Covid-19’, by María Muelas-Gil, turns to another aspect of health communication with a very different audience. Her analysis focuses on books written specifically for children about the pandemic, which have a strong didactic slant. By analysing the text and images together, she shows how metaphor plays an important role in binding words and pictures together to explain four main aspects of the pandemic experience to young readers, namely health in general, the virus, the role of the adults around them, and their own role. She finds that the most prevalent metaphors are those related to fighting and warfare, in which the virus is represented as an object that can be caught or side-stepped, as it travels and spreads. Such a framing, she argues, is both explanatory and persuasive, in that it contains a clear call for action about how to avoid catching or spreading the disease that is easily comprehensible for young readers. In Chapter 8, Neele Mundt and Frank Polzenhagen take a different approach to multimodal data by examining how the Covid-19 pandemic changed the linguistic landscape across the world. Starting from the position that signs are placed in the

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linguistic landscape to ‘trigger a particular behaviour by those who enter the sign’s deictic space’, these authors propose a schema-based approach to Covid-19-related signs in the public space based on what they communicate to their addressees. They divide these signs into five cognitive-linguistic categories, namely rules, warnings, orientation, offers and comments/opinions. The authors provide various examples of each type and analyse these to provide a window onto the mechanisms of linguistic landscaping. Their chapter emphasizes the highly creative and inventive approaches used to communicate orientation, rules, warnings, offers and opinions combining visual and textual information, and explores the intertextual references that are often employed. This schema-based approach to multimodal analysis of this type advances our understanding concerning the deliberate choices realized in the signs that form part of our linguistic landscape. In Chapter 9, Virginia Zorzi examines the representation of the Covid-19 crisis in the American political comedy show LWT, and addresses the following research questions: How, from a linguistic point of view, did LWT cover the global health crisis? What aspects did it focus on, compared to more traditional sources, and which discursive devices were instrumental in this? She finds that LWT episodes deal with pressing social issues related to the pandemic that are afforded little attention in mainstream sources, and she then addresses some of the underrepresented socio-political ramifications of this worldwide health emergency. The use of comedy, she argues, is instrumental in opening up new or divergent perspectives on the pandemic and its handling, and offering a venue for social critique. The next chapter, ‘Social reaction to a new health threat: The perception of the Covid-19 health crisis by British and Spanish readerships’, moves into the important area of reader response, which is often neglected by discourse analysts and is obviously of crucial importance if we want to gain a deeper understanding of crisis communication. Here, Sara Vilar-Lluch studies the readers’ comments in response to articles in Spanish and British newspapers that reported turning points in the Covid-19 health crisis. Her findings show how the experience of the pandemic is conditioned by sociocultural and economic factors external to the pandemic, even though the health threat is conceptualized in a similar way in both societies. The main social factors affecting the perception of the pandemic are the attitudes towards the government in power, and towards the community in general, and the concern for the economy. The British public appeared not to share the general mistrust towards national politics identified among the Spanish readers, but instead showed greater concern for the job market and potential economic recession, especially during the lockdown and in its aftermath. Concerning the development of perceptions over time, the virus was initially represented in both countries as something foreign that ‘came’ to the region of the forum user. During the lockdown the virus was understood as a domestic threat, while at the end of the lockdown the virus was represented as something that may ‘stay’ or ‘come back’. The last chapter in this part, Chapter 11, by Melike Baş and Esranur Efeoğlu-Özcan, brings together two of the main themes in this section by combining a focus on metaphor with an analysis of user-generated content. These authors investigate the metaphors for the Covid-19 crisis in contributions to the platform Ekşi Sözlük (Sour Dictionary), a collaborative crowdsourcing online dictionary, which served as a meaning-making and meaning-negotiation platform for the Turkish online community about the emergence and development of the Covid-19 crisis. By examining the source domains of metaphors associated with the target domains of disease, pandemic, and virus, these authors establish

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the prominence of sources from the domains of cleanliness, conflict, entertainment, entity, illness, living being, movement, nature, school, structure and the supernatural. Their research provides insights into the way ordinary people perceive and try to cope with this novel and unfamiliar crisis. Their study also sheds interesting light on the culturally specific aspects of metaphor in a given context, and in concrete, on the specifically Turkish and Islamic frames underlying some of the metaphors applied to the pandemic. Part III considers the militarization of official political speeches and media reports about the pandemic in Western and non-Western countries, and the pragmatic effects that the war discourse may have on the social community. This part opens with Molly Xie Pan and Joanna Zhuoan Chen’s mixed-methods study of the war metaphor in addresses by the Hong Kong Chief Executive in press conferences dated from January to September 2020. The chapter provides a statistical analysis complemented by a fine-grained critical metaphor analysis of the emotional valences conveyed by the five most recurrent source domains identified in the addresses (i.e. object, war, journey, body and location) and considers the changes in war metaphor usage across the pandemic. The authors take a bottom-up approach for metaphor identification and define the emotional valence according to metaphorical units’ co-text (i.e. positive, negative or neutral). The statistical analysis makes it possible to determine which associations between sources and valences are statistically significant. The five sources examined reveal different behaviours: the body metaphor is associated with a positive valence, frequently used in policy-making and governance explanations; the journey metaphor tends to be associated with a negative valence, employed to report negative developments of the pandemic; the object metaphor showed a tendency for the neutral valence, mainly employed in explaining antipandemic measures, and governance and support topics; location metaphors also tended to be used in neutral explanations of measures adopted; and war metaphors showed a statistical significant association with positive valence, mostly employed in governance and financial policy explanations. A diachronic study shows that the patterns of use of the war metaphor go in parallel with the development of the pandemic: higher numbers of reported cases in the country coincide with an increase in the number of war metaphors employed in the press conferences. In Chapter 13, Yating Yu examines how one of the most dominant concepts of China’s foreign policy, ‘a Community with a Shared Future for Humankind’ (CSFH), has been legitimized in the discourses associated with Covid-19. The study considers 111 news articles from China Daily, a state-owned newspaper, dated from February to July 2020, and examines the role that metaphors played in promoting the diplomatic concept and their ideological implications. CSFH appears up to 218 times in Covid-19 coverage, turning discourses on health communication into an arena for geopolitics to protect China from some Western media and political criticisms while expanding its international influence. The study draws on Critical Metaphor Analysis and considers how war metaphors combine with other linguistic resources (e.g. indexicals, deontic modals and use of numbers and statistics) to evoke the collectivist and humanitarian values of CSFH. The pandemic is an enemy metaphor is strategically employed to represent Covid-19 as a common enemy that all countries have to combat, hence portraying the other countries as allies of China in the global ‘war’ against the virus. The metaphor is also exploited to personify the WHO as the leader of the fight that requires the support of all the allies. In this way, the war metaphor would allow for the projection of China’s national image as a cooperative and reliable ally that respects the WHO’s authority.

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Mariana Neagu, in Chapter 14, considers how the pandemic was depicted in conflictrelated rhetoric in Romanian and British official press statements during the initial phase of the lockdown measures and the four months that followed the outbreak of the pandemic (i.e. March–June 2020), and how such depictions may have influenced public opinion. Her study illustrates how the two prime ministers tend to portray the pandemic as an external factor that puts the wellbeing of the nation in jeopardy, either as an enemy that needs military action to be taken, or as a natural disaster like floods and wildfire. In particular, military metaphors stand as the most salient similarity between the Romanian and British discourses; mainly identified during March 2020, they are used to urge the population to take action and stay together. However, the portrayals of social unity differ dramatically between the two discourses: while the British prime minister makes use of the container metaphor to illustrate the lockdown and the ‘support bubbles’, his Romanian counterpart stresses the need for solidarity through references to a european family. Neagu argues that these differences in conceptualization can be explained through the socio-political history of the two countries. The portrayal of the pandemic in officials’ public discourse is further explored in Chapter 15. Nadežda Silaški and Tatjana Đurović study the portrayal of the pandemic in Serbia in two different data sets: the first one considers the nation addresses delivered by President Aleksandar Vučić during the ‘first wave of the Covid-19 epidemic’, covering from the declaration of the state of emergency (mid-March) to its lifting (early May). The second data set considers press conferences reported in electronic news media outlets and covers the pre-election period until the election day (from May to June). Prior to the pre-election time frame, the Serbian public discourse presented Covid-19 as a personified enemy and exploited the associations of the war metaphor to engender a feeling of patriotism, unity, solidarity and urge to action that would justify and legitimize the anti-pandemic measures enforced. However, the examination of the second data set reveals that the military cognitive frame was readjusted during the pre-election period to accommodate to the political agenda of the ruling party and achieve the desired response from the public in the national elections. Thus, during the election campaign the war metaphor was twisted to the less aggressive sports metaphor. The sports metaphor, which is more collaborative, made it possible to perceive the health crisis as a less dangerous and more stable situation, hence preparing the population to take part in the national elections despite the imminent risk of the pandemic. Chapter 15 constitutes a clear example of the ideological function of metaphors in legitimizing political agendas and promoting a particular vision of the social reality. In Chapter 16, Fabienne Baider and Maria Constantinou investigate how Covid-19 has been represented in the political discourse of four European countries: France, Greece, Denmark and Germany. The authors study the metaphors employed in speeches and interviews from the political leaders of each country and the effects of metaphor choices on crisis management. In particular, Baider and Constantinou investigate whether metaphor choices can be related to politicians’ leadership style and gender. The four political leaders, regardless of gender, promoted social unity and solidarity and presented the measures adopted to prevent the spread of the virus as the logical and unavoidable course of action. While the chapter concludes that, from a gender perspective, the discourses studied present more similarities than differences, the war metaphor is not reported for the two women leaders. However, as the authors point out, we have to be cautious in associating the presence of the war metaphor with gender specificities or

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the leader’s personality, since a myriad of factors such as the speechwriters or the sociohistorical context may have a direct influence on political speeches. Andreas Musolff closes Part III with a study of the development of the war scenario in British governmental statements and their public reception. More than a third of the 178 news articles in his corpus collected from February to October 2020 included the war metaphor. However, the effects of the metaphor in framing the pandemic varied with the development of the war scenario along the first six months of the health crisis. While the initial governmental ‘declaration of war’ against Covid-19 aimed at raising people’s awareness of the danger of the new virus, the media exploited the war scenario to make historical comparisons between pandemic management and the UK’s actions in the Second World War, evoking strong emotions and nationalistic memories among the public. After the ‘Blitz spirit’ reminiscences, war-related vocabulary impregnated communications about the pandemic to portray the relation between the virus (attacker) and the population (defenders). Considering the different rhetorical functions of the pandemic-as-war metaphor, Musolff concludes by stressing the importance of focusing on the pragmatic and intertextual levels of metaphor analysis in order to provide a comprehensive account of their communicative functions. Part IV homes in on the discourse of judgement and rivalry so prevalent during various stages of the pandemic, and takes a longer look at some of the more negative aspects of media and social media communication, examining how different social actors variously attributed blame or evaded responsibility. Since the virus seems to have originated in China, during the initial stages of the pandemic the finger was often pointed at China or, irrationally, at Chinese people elsewhere in the world. In the first chapter in part IV, Peiwen Wang and Theresa Catalano discuss the spread of right-wing populist and xenophobic discourses during the early stages of the pandemic, focusing on comments about a YouTube video documenting Donald Trump’s use of the term ‘Chinese virus’. Their analysis centres on the familiar populist strategy of pitting ‘the people’ against ‘the elites’ (Breeze, 2018; Zienkowski and Breeze, 2019), and shows how many users drew on populist discourses by accusing ‘the elites’ of taking China’s side. These authors explore how aspects such as the casual use of national symbols or the repetitions of key phrases appeared to build a sense of community among like-minded commenters, while the constant denigration of China and the Chinese helped to cement these bonds. The authors conclude that more education is needed on the nature and workings of xenophobic discourse, and on what measures could be taken to counteract it. In Chapter 19, we move into the Chinese social media environment, as Janet Ho and Emily Chiang take us through the way users of the Chinese microblogging site Weibo portrayed Wuhan lockdown escapees during the first wave of the pandemic. In an approach organized around the main metaphors used, they show how the Chinese population represented those who evaded the lockdown as harmful animals, inciting hatred and triggering violent incidents. In some even more alarming images, they also likened evaders to the zombies or demons of Chinese folklore, or to rubbish and rat faeces. The authors conclude that users resorted to building a sharp discursive dichotomy between the moral, educated self and the immoral, uncivilized other in order to assert their superiority and exercise social pressure on wrongdoers. Scapegoating is also the theme for Chapter 20, by Aaquib Khan, which provides an overview of the way Muslims were singled out for blame as the pandemic spread in India.

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The author shows how Islamophobic language became a familiar feature of the way that fear and uncertainty were expressed during the early days of the pandemic, and then continued over the months, triggering periodic attacks on the Muslim community. As the author indicates, pandemics can bring out the best and the worst in any society, and fortunately many media and social campaigners in India took up the challenge to debunk fake news items blaming Muslims for spreading the virus. Nonetheless, this instance is a clear example of the way times of crisis can exacerbate pre-existing social tensions, often with tragic results. Concluding this section, Vesna Mikolič enquires into the ways that media discourse functioned in Slovenia and Italy during the pandemic, centring her analysis particularly on the border area where the population was receiving information from both countries. Her chapter uncovers several major differences which probably reflect different communications policies as well as underlying cultural differences. Thus Prime Minister Janša had the leading role in the reports in the Slovenian media, while the Italian media referred to a wider range of actors and spokespeople. The Italian media discourse focused more clearly on the content of the epidemiological situation and measures, while the Slovenian discourse reflected a more centralized approach, largely framing the pandemic in terms of government policy. Overall, the media in Italy followed a wider range of information sources, especially numerous professional institutions from the field of medicine. These explorations of the language found in media reports also showed that the Slovenian discourse concerning Covid-19 was more descriptive, evaluative and emotional, while the Italian discourse was more informative, formal and professional. Again, this provides insights into how national cultures still constitute the lens through which people in different areas of the world experience events, and how politicians and the media are both constrained by those cultural systems and constantly reproduce them. Faced with a global crisis like that unleashed by Covid-19, it is vital for us to understand such phenomena better, so that we can work towards ways of counteracting futile accusations to generate solidarity and provide mutual support. In Part V, the focus turns to a range of discourse on empathy, encouragement and the fostering of solidarity expressed by professionals, including the communications of medical doctors, fitness experts and political leaders. Chapter 22 by Dariusz Galasiński and Justyna Ziółkowska considers representations of decision-making concerning life-saving resuscitation – CPR communication – looking at how decisions and end-of-life care that involve CPR are constructed. The authors analyse texts in documents, including medical pronouncements, from leading medical organizations such as the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE), to shed light on the ideological landscape regarding administering or withdrawing life-saving treatment. The results of the analysis point to the great importance of explicitness in CPR communication and including patients’ wishes in medical decision-making. In Chapter 23, Kayo Kondo discusses empathy and compassion during the pandemic (Barello and Graffigna, 2020; Holt, 2020) and explores doctors’ verbal responses during online health consultations in the Japanese context. The data indicate that doctors’ showing understanding meets the patients’ need to feel ‘listened to’. The important results include that doctors’ empathic responses not only addressed patients’ fears towards identified symptoms or not-yet-presenting symptoms but also expressed, in a variety of expressive forms, assurance that there was ‘no need’ to go to a medical facility. This finding may indicate that when professionals are taking preventive actions, empathic communication is more effective than simply advising patients to ‘stay at home’. In Chapter 24, Kim Schoofs, Dorien Van De Mieroop, Stephanie Schnurr, Haiyan

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Huang and Anastasia Stavridou analyse identity construction on Instagram, exploring the professional and personal identity work of the medical doctor and Instagram celebrity ‘Dr Mike’ and tracing his audience’s responses. Applying multimodal discourse analytics, Schoofs et al. discuss Dr Mike’s intersectional identity work as a ‘doctor-influencer’ in depth and highlight the important roles that such influencers play in providing and promoting health literacy, including about the highly debated topic of mask wearing. The study also provides insight into the effects on the audience of information shared on social media by doctors, and it discusses the tension between maintaining a professional identity and one as a social media celebrity. Chapter 25, by Ulrike Vogl, Geert Jacobs, Karin Andersson and Jesper Andreasson, investigates health-promotion discourse by fitness professionals – instructors for Les Mills International (LM) – and the linguistic construction of their roles as health promoters during the pandemic. The authors discuss the concepts of ‘glocal’ and ‘glocommodification’ as well as ‘healthism’ ideology (Crawford, 1980). Focus-group discussions with LM instructors from a wide variety of countries were analysed, which reveals how the instructors’ relationships with customers and fellow instructors have been changed by social distancing, and that their sense of belonging to a global community remains strong. The analysis also sheds light on discursive strategies and healthism ideology in professional roles at the global, national and local levels. Part V closes with Chapter 26, in which Marta Degani highlights the range of discursive strategies that New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern has employed in public statements while leading her country through these challenging times. Ardern has been praised for her effective communication throughout the pandemic and her capacity to connect to people empathetically (McGuire et al., 2020). Degani investigates how Ardern engages citizens in cooperative efforts against the virus and focuses particularly on her use of rhetorical strategies and empathy. The findings indicate that Ardern’s communication style has positively affected New Zealanders’ compliance with government measures. The range of issues delineated in these chapters is rich and instructive regarding fostering solidarity among health experts, between professionals and patients, and among global citizens. We hope that these chapters also consider varied social perspectives and issues regarding the practice of qualitative discourse studies related to unity and empathy in public health.

NOTES 1 2

See e.g. Finset (2020), Kortmann and Schultze (2020) and Oswick et al. (2020). See e.g. Laucht and Jackson (2020), Münkler and Münkler (2020), ReframeCovid (2020) and United Nations (2020).

REFERENCES Barello, S. and G. Graffigna (2020), ‘Caring for health professionals in the Covid-19 pandemic emergency: Toward an “Epidemic of Empathy” in Healthcare’, Frontiers in Psychology, 11: 1431. Breeze, R. (2018), ‘Enemies of the people’: Populist performances in the Daily Mail reporting of the Article 50 case’, Discourse, Context & Media, 25: 60–7. Crawford, R. (1980), ‘Healthism and the medicalization of everyday life’, International Journal of Health Services, 10 (3): 365–88. Finset, A. et al. (2020), ‘Effective health communication–a key factor in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic’, Patient Education and Counseling, 103 (5): 873.

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Holt, G. R. (2020), ‘The pandemic effect: Raising the bar for ethics, empathy, and professional collegiality’, Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery, 16 (4): 621–2. Kortmann, B. and G. G. Schultze eds. (2020), Jenseits von Corona. Unsere Welt nach der Pandemie – Perspektiven aus der Wissenschaft, Bielefeld: transcript. Kress, G. (2010), Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication, London: Routledge. Kress, G. and T. Van Leeuwen (2001), Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication, London: Arnold. Kress, G. and T. Van Leeuwen (2006), Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, London: Routledge. Laucht, C. and S. T. Jackson (2020), ‘Soldiering a pandemic: The threat of militarized rhetoric in addressing Covid-19’, History and Politics. 24 April. http://www.historyandpolicy. org/opinion-articles/articles/soldiering-a-pandemic-the-threat-of-militarized-rhetoric-inaddressing-covid-19 (accessed 20 January 2021). McGuire, D., Cunningham, J. E. A., Reynolds, K. and G. Matthews-Smith (2020), ‘Beating the virus: An examination of the crisis communication approach taken by New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern during the Covid-19 pandemic’, Human Resource Development International, DOI: 10.1080/13678868.2020.1779543. Münkler, H. and M. Münkler (2020), ‘Der Einbruch des Unvorhersehbaren und wie wir uns zukünftig darauf vorbereiten sollten’, in B. Kortmann and G. G. Schulze (eds), Jenseits von Corona, 101–8, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Oswick, C., Grant, D. and R. Oswick (2020), ‘Categories, crossroads, control, connectedness, continuity, and change: A metaphorical exploration of COVID-19’, The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 56 (3): 284–8. ReframeCovid (2020), ReframeCovid. Available online: https://sites.google.com/view/ reframecovid/home (accessed 20 January 2021). Reisigl, M. and R. Wodak (2009), ‘The Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA)’, in R. Wodak and M. Meyer (eds), Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, 87–121, London: Sage. United Nations (2020), ‘UN Tackles “Infodemic” of misinformation and cybercrime in COVID-19 Crisis’, United Nations, 28 March. Available online: https://www.un.org/en/ un-coronavirus-communications-team/un-tackling-%E2%80%98infodemic%E2%80%99misinformation-and-cybercrime-covid-19 (accessed 20 January 2021). Zienkowski, J. and R. Breeze (2019), Imagining the peoples of Europe. Populist discourse across the Political Spectrum, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

PART ONE

The discourse of authority in a global crisis: Who defines (if there is) a pandemic?

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CHAPTER ONE

Covid-19 press conferences across time: World Health Organization vs. Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs DENNIS TAY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND COMMUNICATION, THE HONG KONG POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY

INTRODUCTION Press conferences are the standard platform for institutional representatives to communicate with the public through the media. From a critical discourse analytic perspective, the communication of factual information is only part of their nature. They also reveal ‘how ideologies are discussed and negotiated, how power relations are asserted, and how political differences on difficult issues are discussed and communicated in a positive way’ (Bhatia, 2006: 174). While linguistic aspects of press conferences still remain curiously underexamined, existing studies have focused on those with an explicit political intention, as they most clearly depict ideologies and power relations. These range from theoretical reflections on media–government relations (Fairclough, 2000) to case studies of individual politicians’ behaviour (Ryfe, 1999) and nuanced thematic analysis of politicians’ utterances (Bhatia, 2006). The impact of Covid-19 has likewise led to multiple press conferences over a relatively short period to communicate not just facts about the pandemic, but stances towards implicated sociopolitical issues like global solidarity, responsibility and other ideological tensions. Two prominent institutions in this regard are the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Chinese government, represented internationally by its Ministry of Foreign Affairs (CMFA). As an agency of the United Nations responsible for international public health, the WHO has been in the spotlight since the onset of Covid-19. They have held regular press conferences since 22 January 2020 to provide situation updates, disseminate information on the latest measures and – perhaps most interestingly from a critical perspective – co-ordinate efforts between different countries. The Chinese government has come under considerable international scrutiny for its

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alleged cover-ups of key information during the onset, as well as using its financial clout to exert influence on the WHO. As it has since positioned itself as successfully containing the virus and a potential leader of the global fight, regular press conferences given by CMFA have likewise been dominated by Covid-related issues and its ideological underpinnings. These include addressing the allegations, and the role of Covid-19 in the wider strategic rivalry between China and the United States. Given this backdrop, it becomes interesting not only to examine but also to compare the language of Covid-19 press conferences from WHO and CMFA. The former is in principle a neutral health authority with an international ambit, while the latter has not been accorded an ideologically neutral position even as it attempts to assert international influence. Nevertheless, the aforementioned allegations of their complicity lead one to wonder to what extent their stances, as linguistically manifested, might actually align. This chapter presents a study of near-daily English language press conferences by WHO and CMFA across a three-month span from 20 January, near the crisis onset, to 1 May 2020. It adopts analytic perspectives that differ from, but are complementary with, existing studies on (political) press conferences. First, rather than focusing on what gets communicated via content/thematic analyses, the present study investigates how, with computer-assisted analysis of attitudes and stances revealed through lexical choices (Pennebaker et al., 2015; Tausczik and Pennebaker, 2010). This approach moves beyond impactful, but ultimately isolated, examples of discursive strategies realized in short extracts, to make claims about more representative bodies of data. Second, the study explicitly models diachronic shifts in these lexical measures with time series analytic methods that have underexplored potential for discourse research (Tay, 2017, 2019). It addresses the following research questions and their implications for understanding socio-psychological stances towards Covid-19: i. How does the language of WHO and CMFA Covid-19 press conferences compare in terms of socio-psychological constructs like analyticity, authenticity, clout and emotional tone? ii. Does this language exhibit modellable structural regularities across time?

DATA AND METHOD WHO and CMFA press conference transcripts were downloaded from their respective websites.1 The time span of interest was from 20 January to 1 May 2020. This covers an approximate three-month period from when the China National Health Commission first confirmed that the virus was human-to-human transmissible,2 to just after the 100th WHO situation report was released. This resulted in a corpus of 50 WHO (377,359 words) and 67 CMFA transcripts (109,647 words), as there were days without press conferences. The data was cleaned by removing irrelevant details like introductory text, but both media questions and responses were retained for analysis. The analytical methodology comprises four distinct steps: (i) automated lexical analysis with the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program (Pennebaker et al., 2015), (ii) comparative statistical analyses of resulting variables between the two corpora, (iii) time series analysis of the variables following the Box-Jenkins method with ARIMA models (Box et al., 2015; Tay, 2019) and (iv) close contextual analysis of illustrative examples implied by the above results. Steps (i) and (iii) will be described in more detail below as they are likely to be more unfamiliar to readers.

COVID-19 PRESS CONFERENCES ACROSS TIME

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Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) is a computerized text analysis program widely used in socio-psychological studies of language(s) in many contexts. It computes word frequencies in an input text under approximately ninety different lexical (e.g. cognitive, affective, social) and grammatical categories (e.g. parts of speech). Additionally, it can compute four ‘summary variables’: analytical thinking, clout, authenticity and emotional tone, each defined by some combination of the above lexical/grammatical categories. Many studies have shown that these categories co-occur and reliably differentiate input texts along the traits implied by the summary variables. These are summarized in Table 1.1. Plus signs indicate categories that are relatively frequent in texts that reflect a higher level of that summary variable, and vice versa for minus signs. The psychometric properties of LIWC are detailed in Pennebaker et al. (2015). Each summary variable in an input text is scored from 0 to 100, based on standardized scores from large comparison samples. A high analytical thinking score suggests formal, logical and hierarchical thinking versus informal, personal, here-and-now and narrative thinking. This is based on a study of American college admission essays, where essays with more articles and prepositions were found to be more formal and precise in describing objects, events, goals and plans, while those with more pronouns, auxiliary verbs, etc. were more likely to involve personal stories (Pennebaker et al., 2014). A high clout score suggests speaking/writing with high expertise and confidence versus a more tentative and humble style. This is based on studies of decision-making tasks, chats and personal correspondences. Higher-status individuals used more we/our, you/ your and fewer tentative words. This was explained by an association between relative status and attentional bias. Higher-ups are more other-focused and less unsure, while lower individuals are more self-focused and tentative (Kacewicz et al., 2013). A high authenticity score suggests more honest, personal and disclosing discourse versus more guarded and distanced discourse. This is based on studies of elicited true versus false stories where the latter has fewer first- and third-person pronouns, exclusive words and more negative emotion and motion verbs. This was explained by the idea that

TABLE 1.1:  Summary variables and defining lexical categories Summary variable

Defining lexical categories

Analytical thinking

+articles, prepositions -pronouns, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, adverbs, negations (Pennebaker et al., 2014)

Clout

+1st person plural pronouns, 2nd person pronouns -tentative words (e.g. maybe, perhaps) (Kacewicz et al., 2013)

Authenticity

+1st person singular pronouns, 3rd person pronouns, exclusive words (e.g. but, except, without) -negative emotion words (e.g. hurt, ugly, nasty), motion verbs (e.g. walk, move, go) (Newman et al., 2003)

Emotional tone

+positive emotion words (e.g. love, nice, sweet) -negative emotion words (e.g. hurt, ugly, nasty) (Cohn, Mehl and Pennebaker, 2004)

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TABLE 1.2:  Summary variables and interpretation Summary variable

Interpretation High (50–100)

Low (0–50)

Middle (~50)

Analytical thinking

Formal, logical, hierarchical

Informal, here-andnow, narrative

Balanced

Clout

Expert-like, confident

Tentative, humble

Authentic

Personal, disclosing

Guarded, distant

Tone

Upbeat, positive

Anxious, sad, hostile

Neutral, ambivalent

liars tend to dissociate themselves with the lie, feel greater tension and guilt, and speak in less cognitively complex ways. These linguistic tendencies accurately distinguished truthtellers versus liars in independent data more than 60 per cent of the time (Newman et al., 2003). A high emotional tone score suggests a more positive and upbeat style, a low score anxiety/sadness/hostility, while a neutral score around 50 a lack of emotionality. This was based on a study of online journals prior to and after the September 11 attacks where negative emotion words increased sharply following the attack and gradually returned to pre-attack baselines after some time (Cohn, Mehl and Pennebaker, 2004). Table 1.2 summarizes the four variables and the general interpretation of high/low/middle scores. With each transcript as an input text, LIWC thus provides multivariate profiles of the language of press conferences across the time span – an approach that has recently been applied to other discourse contexts with a socio-psychological emphasis like psychotherapy talk (Huston et al., 2019; Tay, 2020), editorials (Tay 2021a), and social media (Tay 2021b). The four summary variables are especially useful for revealing aspects such as whether Covid-19 issues are logically or narratively framed, power relations projected by speakers, extents of disclosure and emotional attitudes towards the situation. They complement semantic annotation tools like USAS (Archer et al., 2002) that focus more on content categories like ‘food and farming’ or ‘science and technology’.

Time series analysis (Box-Jenkins method) A time series is a set of consecutive measurements of a random variable made at intervals that are usually equally spaced (e.g. minutes, days, years). Examples include stock prices, heartbeat and rainfall. A typical time series appears like erratic fluctuations with some trends and/or cyclical behaviour embedded within. Analysts have two general objectives: (i) to discover mathematically expressible regularities underlying the series, and (ii) to forecast future values on that basis. The main difference between time series analysis and standard regression models is that the latter assumes measurements to be mutually independent, and relies on how these measurements correlate with other predictor variables. The former, on the other hand, relies precisely on how the values within the series itself are correlated with one another (i.e. auto-correlated), without considering the influence of other external predictors. The Box-Jenkins method (Box et al., 2015) is one of the most widely used by time series analysts. Tay (2019) argues that many

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17

discourse contexts lead to naturally occurring time series, and demonstrates how to apply the Box-Jenkins method on news articles, classroom talk and psychotherapy sessions, the latter of which can profit from forecasting future linguistic behaviour by clients. As an exploratory modelling approach that solely considers values across time without input from other preconceived predictors, it dovetails with bottom-up discourse analytic approaches where data patterns are first established, and then interpreted or explained. The stepwise methodology (i.e. inspecting the series, calculating autocorrelations, selecting and evaluating candidate models, performing residual diagnostics) is detailed in Tay (2019) and will not be repeated here due to space constraints. I will instead highlight the major sources of insight one can expect in a more conceptual way. At the specific level, the details of a good fitting final model for any linguistic/discursive variable can reveal much about its nature across time. Take, for example, what are known as ‘autoregressive’ (AR) models. Its generic form is yt = C + Φk yt–k + at where ●●

●●

yt is the present value in the series C is known as the constant term of the model

●●

Φ k is a coefficient also known as the AR operator

●●

yt–k is the past series values at time t−k

●●

at is the error term at time t

From this, we can derive information like the mean value of the series and the direction and extent to which the present value is linearly related to the value k intervals in the past. These can in turn be interpreted with careful reference to specific contextual characteristics of the discourse. At the general level, which will be the focus of this chapter, we consider the very fact of whether the linguistic/discursive variable at hand (i.e. analytic thinking, authenticity, clout and emotional tone) is ‘modellable’. A modellable series is a series for which a well-defined model can be found to fit adequately. Conversely, a non-modellable series is a series of randomly fluctuating values in time, with no autocorrelation among the values. This is known in statistical parlance as ‘white noise’. From a discourse analytic perspective, a modellable series means we can predict (with varying degrees of accuracy) the value of the discourse variable at any interval. Coupled with background information on the discourse event (i.e. the Covid-19 situation), we could then explore if (i) the predictability of discourse is linked to corresponding predictability of the background event (i.e. the discourse passively ‘reflects’ the event, like the predictable four-yearly rise in ‘Summer Olympics’ in newspapers), or if (ii) the predictability of discourse exists despite unpredictable background events (i.e. the discourse might in some way ‘construe’ the event). The latter, of course, resonates with constructivist and critical discourse analytic assumptions about the relationship between discourse and the social world (Fairclough, 2013; Glasersfeld, 1996). On the other hand, a non-modellable series implies that regardless of whether the background event is predictable, the use of that linguistic/discursive variable simply does not evidence noteworthy patterning across time. The quantitative analyses of this chapter (comparative analysis of variable scores followed by time series analysis) are therefore complementary. The former involves typical comparisons of average values across time without taking temporal patterns into account, while the latter does so in an explicit manner.

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RESULTS AND DISCUSSION The histograms in Figure 1.1 show the distribution of the four summary variables scores in WHO and CMFA press conferences, respectively. Table 1.3 provides supplementary descriptive statistics of the sample size, mean, median, standard deviation and normality tests. The Shapiro-Wilk p-values (H0 = variable is normally distributed, α = 0.05) suggest that most variables are normally distributed across the time span except for Clout (WHO), Analytic (CMFA), and Authentic (CMFA). Before comparing the scores between WHO

FIGURE 1.1:  Distribution of summary variable scores

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TABLE 1.3:  Descriptive statistics of summary variable scores N Mean Median Standard deviation Shapiro-Wilk p

Source

Analytic

Clout

Authentic

Tone

WHO

50

50

50

50

CMFA

67

67

67

67

WHO

61.4

86.2

32.2

58.2

CMFA

93.8

81.5

26.9

59.2

WHO

61.8

86.9

30.9

57.6

CMFA

94.4

82.4

23.8

58.3

WHO

8.43

4.15

6.13

11.1

CMFA

2.80

4.56

10.7

16.1

WHO

0.352

0.025

0.712

0.344

CMFA