Media representations of China amid COVID-19: A corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis

Although there has been an increasing number of studies investigating media representations of the COVID-19 outbreak around the world, less international attention has been given to Chinese media outlets' coverage of the COVID-19 outbreak than that of their western counterparts. This study employs corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis to investigate how China is linguistically represented in a state-run English-language news media. The analysis reveals that China is respectively represented as a victim, a fighter, and a cooperative/supportive country with ideological implications for global solidarity and humanitarianism. This study sheds light on the effective use of discursive strategies in promoting international cooperation and building a national image amid a global health crisis. The value of using corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis to examine national image is also highlighted. © The Author(s) 2023.

Collective identity construction in the covid-19 crisis

Since the pandemic broke out in 2020, China has widely presented the covid crisis in its mass media and actively constructed collective identity thereof to mobilize medical workers, unify political stances, boost domestic solidarity, and promote international support. This paper combines the Discourse-Historical Approach and a multimodal perspective to investigate how the Chinese state-run news agency People's Daily discursively achieves these purposes on TikTok. A combination of qualitative and quantitative methods is used to present the high-frequency topoi of justifying the crisis and referential and predicational strategies of shaping collective identity within, which can fall into four dimensions: positive Self, negative Self, negative Others, and positive Others. The linguistic resources can be intensified/mitigated by visual-aural ensembles, which can draw the audience's attention and arouse their emotional attachments. This study also summarizes the embedded values in the discourses and situates them in socio-political contexts. © John Benjamins Publishing Company

Collective identity construction in the covid-19 crisis A multimodal discourse-historical approach

Since the pandemic broke out in 2020, China has widely presented the covid crisis in its mass media and actively constructed collective identity thereof to mobilize medical workers, unify political stances, boost domestic solidarity, and promote international support. This paper combines the Discourse-Historical Approach and a multimodal perspective to investigate how the Chinese state-run news agency People's Daily discursively achieves these purposes on TikTok. A combination of qualitative and quantitative methods is used to present the high-frequency topoi of justifying the crisis and referential and predicational strategies of shaping collective identity within, which can fall into four dimensions: positive Self, negative Self, negative Others, and positive Others. The linguistic resources can be intensified/mitigated by visual-aural ensembles, which can draw the audience's attention and arouse their emotional attachments. This study also summarizes the embedded values in the discourses and situates them in socio-political contexts.

Legitimizing Crisis Management during COVID-19

Mid-March 2020, European governments (and beyond) could not deny the Covid-19 dangerous pandemic anymore;they had to quickly cope with the crisis. Different modes of crisis communication have been adopted by government leaders to persuade people to abide by various measures to counteract the spreading of the virus, and thus to reduce fears and uncertainties. Some measures implied severe restrictions of human rights (such as freedom of movement, and so forth). Therefore, different legitimation strategies were applied to create society-wide consensus that such measures were indeed necessary. Some governments have also instrumentalized the pandemic for their authoritarian aims. This paper analyzes various strategies of legitimation, following the approach first developed by Van Leeuwen and Wodak (1999) and elaborated in Wodak (2018, 2021). In this way, legitimation is linked to specific argumentation schemes, always in context-dependent ways. The data for this paper stem from governmental speeches and press conferences in Austria, Hungary, Sweden, New Zealand, and France, in the period of March 2020 until December 2020.

A Corpus-Based Discourse-Historical Analysis of China- related Coverage of COVID-19 in Chinese and American Mainstream Media

Through employing Ruth Wodak's discourse-historical approach, one of the most influential schools of Critical Discourse Analysis, as the guiding theory, the paper conducted a corpus-based study on China-related coverage of COVID-19 in Chinese and American mainstream media. With the help of the various functions of the corpus such as concordance, word clusters, keyword list, and so on, both qualitative and quantitative research methods are adopted to explore the changes in the focus of Chinese and American media in different periods and their respective discursive strategies. It is hoped that by combining synchronic research with diachronic research, this paper can effectively explore the deep-rooted reasons behind such differences and changes, and provide insights for the high-quality construction of China's national image.

Securitization, Emergency and the Rediscovery of Responsibility in Times of Pandemic: Analyzing Political Discourses from the European South

This chapter intends to provide an argumentative perspective on the justification of securitization by Southern EU’s political leaders in times of a public health crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic by examining instances of public discourses, specifically addresses to the nation of four EU leaders with different ideological positioning, in different social settings of the European South. Based on the theory of securitization, we perceive public debate as a polylogical phenomenon where multiple actors, from multiple (ideological) positions, in multiple times and spaces interact, creating a complex network of public communication while expressing and supporting their claims. Through this prism, our aim is to shed light on argumentative polylogues by unveiling whether and how the state of emergency has been justified. We employ the frame of the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) to Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016) to study the socio-historically conditions against which established endoxical premises are (re)constructed by the political leadership and how these interrelate with specific argumentation strategies (topoi) in the social settings under scrutiny. We then draw on the quasi-Y structure provided by the Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT) (Rigotti & Greco, 2019) to scrutinize the interplay of topical and endoxical premises in the development of single standpoint-argument couplings. © 2022, The Author(s).