The Representation of the First COVID-19 Case in Jordan in News Outlets: A Critical Discourse Analysis Study

During pandemics, health discourse cannot be separated from media discourse, which usually exercises its power to deliver particular ideological and political perspectives through the content it presents. This study aimed to investigate the coverage of the first case of COVID-19 in Jordan in local and nonlocal Arabic news outlets. It shed light on the potential ideologies reflected in the news headlines and articles. To achieve the objectives of the study, eight local and fourteen nonlocal news articles tackling the first case of COVID-19 in Jordan on the 2nd and 3rd of March 2020 were collected and analyzed in light of Van Dijk's critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach. The results showed that the nonlocal news headlines and articles included words with negative connotations that may create resentment and spread panic among citizens. On the other hand, in local news outlets, reassuring phrases were used by focusing on the government's procedures and distancing Jordan from the country where the virus widely spread, namely, Italy.

Siamo in Cura, non in Guerra: WAR metaphors, political discourse, and evaluation during the Covid-19 pandemic

The present paper analyses political tweets regarding the Covid-19 crisis. It focuses on four leaders-Trump, Johnson, Sánchez, and Conte-and in a particular time frame: March 2020. The goal of this paper is twofold: on the one hand, it endeavours to confirm whether war metaphors are pervasive in the discourse of the pandemic, on the other, it seeks to transcend the conceptual approach to metaphor and situate it within the context of evaluation in discourse. In order to do so, once war metaphors are individuated, we identify the evaluative processes implied in their use. Our claim is that war metaphors played an essential role not only by framing a novel situation as a conflict, but also by allowing the situation to be evaluated in a way that would provoke the audience to act. © Peter Lang Group AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2023. All rights reserved.

Balancing words, balancing lives: framing vulnerability in times of crisis

Words matter, especially in times of crisis. This article analyses the complexities of political discourse on vulnerability by considering the case of the Dutch COVID-19 response. Our study finds that the framing of vulnerability as a predetermined and naturalised condition, linked to old age and pre-existing medical conditions, draws attention away from aspects of precarisation tied to economic position, social class, cultural background and living conditions. This rhetorical strategy can be understood as a practice of de-responsibilisation through which attention is rhetorically diverted from the way(s) in which political authorities are implicated in producing, exacerbating or failing to mitigate vulnerabilities.

Interpersonal-function topoi in Chinese central government's work report (2020) as epidemic (counter-)crisis discourse

Using Systemic Functional Grammar and conceptual framework in the argumentation-oriented approach to discourse, this study analyzes Chinese central government's " Report on the Work of the Government" in 2020 (henceforth the Report) to explore the "interpersonal-function topoi" in the political discourse. The Report was delivered and issued against the backdrop of the surging covid-19 epidemic. This study first calculated the frequency of mood, modality and persons in the Report. The statistics were qualitatively analyzed in relation to various topoi-imagery of the crisis vis-a-vis representing the agency-reflected in the interpersonal metafunction of the language in the Report. These topoi play a vital role in winning popular support for the Chinese central government's anti-epidemic measures and mobilizing the widest public into actions against the covid-19 pandemic. The analysis demonstrates how the analysis of interpersonal metafunction from an argumentation-oriented perspective can shed light on dealing with crisis discourse, especially in the pandemic settings.

Civil Society as an Agent of Change

The covid-19 crisis is the tip of an iceberg. In actual fact, the crisis goes much deeper. It comprises a crisis of democracy, of the nation state, and of capitalism. We are in the middle of an iconic turn and face challenges of an unprecedented scale. It seems inconceivable to tackle any of these challenges without involving societal actors wherever they are. Civil society has proven to be an important agent of change, and has a lot to bring to the table. Yet, knowledge of civil society is underdeveloped, and the state and the private sector hesitate to introduce a level playing field that would enable civil society to act in the sense that Habermas (and others) describe as deliberative democracy to mean the participative process needed to move an agenda by debate prior to taking decisions. © 2022, The Author(s).

Linking Word Use and Personality Characteristics: A Contrastive Study into Parliamentary Communications of Labour Leaders Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer

Over the past thirty years, Russian linguistic studies have noted terminological heterogeneity in the concepts of "jazykovaja lichnost” and "kommunikativnaja lichnost”, literally "linguistic personality” and "communicative personality”, however, in the field of political communication, due to the inextricable connection of political discourse with the socio-cultural, historical, or political context that constructs it, their differentiation was observed rather than interchangeability. This research seeks to characterise "kommunikativnaja lichnost”, a key concept in linguopersonology. The evidence base is parliamentary speeches of Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer, previous and current leaders of the Labor Party of Great Britain. The results of a qualitative analysis have been verified through the Sketch Engine content analysis program, and they demonstrate how a politician's rhetoric can change depending on situational factors — in this case, the foreign political situation and domestic political processes. The overarching theme of the politicians' communications is the termination of the UK's membership in the European Union and the protracted coronavirus pandemic, which is the root of all social and economic ills. The words frequently used by Corbyn and Starmer are predetermined by the communicative behaviours of the politicians. The article attempts to determine the ‘communicative personality' of Corbin and Starman using the leadership typology proposed by Harold Lasswell. This work thus contributes to the development of linguopersonology provisions and raises the necessity to develop types of the ‘communicative personality' of a politician. Given the analysis results, the article suggests interpreting the Russian concept ‘kommunikativnaja lichnost' as ‘linking word use and personality characteristics'. © 2023, RUDN UNiversity.

Hands-On Interactive Neuro-Symbolic NLP with DRaiL

We recently introduced DRaiL, a declarative neuro-symbolic modeling framework designed to support a wide variety of NLP scenarios. In this demo, we enhance DRaiL with an easy to use Python interface equipped with methods to define, modify and augment models interactively, as well as with methods to debug and visualize the predictions made. We demonstrate this interface with two challenging NLP tasks: analyzing moral sentiment in political discourse, and analyzing opinions about the Covid-19 vaccine. © 2022 Association for Computational Linguistics.

Alone We Fall: A review of Jennifer Gaffney, Political Loneliness: Modern Liberal Subjects in Hiding

(4) Gaffney notes correctly that when thinking about the challenge posed by Arendt's analysis of the elements that "crystallized” into totalitarianism, commentators tend to stress Arendt's "right to have rights,” namely the fundamental right to belong to a political community, which is the only guarantee for human rights in the current "age of statelessness.” In today's political discourse—about global warming or COVID, for example— even the most basic facts about the world (not to mention how to interpret them and what to do to address the challenges they pose) are contested by certain parties and movements, whether for political reasons or because they are true believers. Gaffney reads the "hidden” Trump supporter who surprised so many in the 2016 elections through Arendt's metaphor of the light that the public sphere sheds on those who participate in it and the darkness and "hiddenness” that characterize the private sphere: [T]he very language of hiddenness points to a broader failure within our society to create robust political spaces for the appearance of speech and action. If in-depth accounts such as Arlie Russell Hochschild's Strangers in their Own Land paint an accurate picture, they are motivated by a strong sense of threat to their most fundamental cultural, social, and religious beliefs, and by a sense of a broad movement of which they are a part and which Trump represented.

COVID-19 Conceptual Metaphors in Jordanian Political Discourse: Evidence from a Newspaper-based Corpus

Conceptual Metaphors are part of human cognition and are essential to human knowledge and experience. The study reported here examines the COVID-19 conceptual metaphors underlying the metaphoric language employed by Jordanian government officials during two periods in 2020, namely from February to May and September to December. To this end, a corpus of official statements (n=213) reported in Al-Rai ‘The Opinion', an Arabic daily mainstream newspaper, was collected and analyzed using the Cognitive Metaphor Theory proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 2003). Identified conceptual metaphors are categorized under the following eight source domains: WARFARE, CONTAINER, OCEAN, JOURNEY, NATURAL PHENOMENON, EXAMINATION, ANIMAL, and SPORT. A comparison of the frequency of these metaphors in each period is established. The analysis reveals that WARFARE and CONTAINER metaphors have the highest frequency in both periods followed by OCEAN and JOURNEY. The percentage of the other four domains is less than five percent. Conceptual metaphors subsumed under the frequent domains, namely, WARFARE, CONTAINER, OCEAN, and JOURNEY are further examined and discussed following Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black 2004). The results show that during the first period, the priority given by the Jordanian government was to focus on convincing people of the restrictive measures which suspended freedom. Therefore, WARFARE has dominated the scene. However, as the crisis progressed, the CONTAINER metaphors took over. This study may assist government agencies to use the right metaphors to impact the public opinion and win the masses to their stands. © 2023, Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. All rights reserved.

Are We on Our Own or Pressed into ein Kollektiv? The Keyword Pragmatic Trajectory in the German Public and Political Discourse: Corpus-Driven Discourse Analysis

This study investigates the semantics and pragmatics of the German keyword "Kollektiv” based on its actual uses in public discourse and by political actors. "Kollektiv” is regarded as a concept of greatsocial significance, yet it is also a most controversial notion. It relates to the universal values and benefits of collectivism such as mutual assistance, solidarity, effective cooperation when coping with difficulties, mutual support and sympathy. However, otherfeatures of collectivism such as having to integrate oneself into the community, setting equal boundaries for individuals, and invading people's privacy activate negative meanings. This governs the evaluation-based polysemy of the keyword. The explanatory approach in this paper was formulated against the background of deontic meaning as a basic concept in semantics to analyze social evaluation of salient lexis. On par with their descriptive meaning, keywords have a deontic meaning component that their denotational interpretability depends on.The study was carried out as corpus-driven discourse analytical research. Discourse analysis proceeded as noncritical linguistic discourse analysis. To provide a functional perspective on Kollektiv, the "Digital Dictionary of the German Language”/"Das Digitale Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache” was used with its two sections of dictionaries and text corpora. Two specialized corpora from the "Digital dictionary” were employed: the "Corona corpus” that contains electronic texts with over 50 mln tokens on the coronavirus pandemic, and the corpus "Political Speeches” containing records of proceedings of the government bodies of German-speaking countries and regions as well as transcripts of oral speeches delivered by politicians. We show that the word "Kollektiv”is employed both as description and as evaluation setting up both positive and negative deontics. The deontic polysemy of "Kollektiv” is activated in contextual uses. The conducted study addresses the way in which linguistic forms get integrated in larger activities in the social world and how, through salient lexicalizations in discourse, they open up the perspective to social diversity and polyphony. © 2022 Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. All rights reserved.

TWITTER, SOCIAL SERVICES AND COVID-19 . ANALYSIS OF THE COMMUNICATIVE INTERACTIONS OF THE COMMUNICATIVE INTERACTIONS OF THE MESSAGES EMITTED BY POLITICAL PARTIES, SOCIAL POLITICAL PARTIES, SOCIAL ENTITIES, AND CITIZENS

The state of alarm caused by Covid-19 has mobilised the digital social partici-pation of the population in social networks. Likewise, the relevance acquired by Social Services in the socio-health crisis has generated an unprecedented social debate on Twitter about the reality of these services. In the article, tweets about Social Services and Covid-19 published during the pandemic were analysed using Atlas.Ti software. The results show the precariousness of Social Services and the need for a change in the management and financing model of these services in order to guarantee social benefits. © GKA Ediciones, authors.

Cristalización legislativa de los procesos de securitización de la covid-19. Aplicabilidad del modelo de la Escuela de Seguridad de Copenhague al análisis de la Ley 4/1981 sobre los estados de alarma, excepción y sitio y la Ley 2/2021 de medidas para la gestión de la pandemia

El objeto de este artículo es realizar una propuesta teórico-metodológica a partir del modelo de análisis de la Escuela de seguridad de Copenhague para incorporar el examen de textos legislativos al estudio de los procesos de securitización. Con este objetivo, se realiza una aproximación al estudio de la securitización de la pandemia de la covid-19 a través del análisis comparativo de dos textos que han dado cobertura legislativa a la gestión de esta crisis sanitaria en España. El texto de la Ley orgánica 4/1981 sobre los estados de alarma, excepción y sitio;y el texto de la Ley 2/2021 del Parlamento Vasco de medidas para la gestión de la pandemia. Metodológicamente, este artículo analiza la securitización de la covid-19 a partir del modelo propuesto por la Escuela de seguridad de Copenhague desarrollado a raíz de la publicación de Security: A New Framework For Analysis (Buzan et al., 1997). Numerosas investigaciones han aplicado este modelo de análisis en el estudio de las políticas de seguridad sobre fenómenos como los movimientos migratorios (Müller y Gerbauer, 2021), la emergencia climática o la crisis sanitaria de la covid-19, examinando objetos tan diversos como los textos publicados en medios de comunicación social (Karyotis et al., 2021), el análisis de las audiencias (Bengtsson y Rhinard, 2019) o los discursos políticos (Kuleteva y Clifford, 2021). Un modelo que también se nutrió de las contribuciones posteriores de Balzacq (2005), Salter (2008) y Stritzel (2007, 2012) que ampliaron aún más los objetos de estudio de la securitización, que dejaron de ser exclusivamente textos de carácter político comunicados de manera lineal, para incorporar el análisis de la audiencia como un agente que interactúa y participa de la creación del discurso securitizador, la performance asociada a la ejecución del discurso o la interactividad del discurso en las redes sociodigitales. Sin embargo, pese a esta diversificación de estudios, la mayoría de las investigaciones sobre la securitización siguen centrándose en textos pertenecientes a discursos políticos o mediáticos. Se observa una ausencia de análisis de otro tipo de textos como aquellos de carácter legislativo, que también es interesante estudiar en el marco de estos procesos. Se trata de textos que, en muchos casos, dan cobertura legislativa a la aplicación de políticas de seguridad y podrían representar la cristalización legal de discursos político mediáticos previos. Dicho esto, dado el carácter jurídico de los textos que se examinan en este artículo, conviene señalar que el análisis que se propone es de carácter discursivo. Sin analizar las implicaciones jurídicas de los textos, cuestión que necesitaría otro tipo de tratamiento teórico-metodológico, nos proponemos observar la construcción discursiva de la seguridad que subyace en ellos y las consecuencias que, siguiendo las hipótesis de la Escuela de seguridad de Copenhague, esto conlleva. El artículo se estructura en tres partes. En el primer apartado, se realiza un breve acercamiento a la evolución de la investigación sobre seguridad en el campo de las Relaciones Internacionales y a la teoría de la securitización elaborada por la Escuela de seguridad de Copenhague en los años noventa. En el segundo apartado, se describe el contexto de crisis sanitaria global y, en concreto, en el caso de España, junto con los procesos de securitización que la acompañan. En tercer lugar, se presentan los documentos examinados y la operacionalización que permite su análisis. Posteriormente, se aborda la discusión sobre los resultados y las conclusiones.Alternate abstract:The aim of this article is to present a theoretical-methodological proposal based on a model of analysis from the Copenhagen School of Security Studies, which incorporates the examination of legislative texts into the study of securitization processes. With this objective, we propose an approach to the study of the securitization of the Covid-19 pandemic through the comparative analysis o two texts that have given legislative coverage to the management of this health crisis in Spain. The text of (1) Organic Law 4/1981 on the states of alarm, exception and siege;and the text of (2) Law 2/2021 of the Basque Parliament on measures for managing the pandemic. After the publication of Security:A New Framework For Analysis (Buzan et al.l997), numerous investigations have used the securitization analysis model of the Copenhagen School of Security Studies to study security policies on phenomena such as migratory movements (Müller and Gerbauer, 2021), the climate emergency, or the health crisis of Covid-19 by examining the texts published on social media (Karyotis et al., 202l),or the analysis of the audiences (Bengtsson and Rhinard, 2019) or political discourses (Kuleteva and Clifford, 2021). Securitization theory holds that what gives an issue the status of threat results from an interaction between an actor, whether it is a state, an organization, or the media, and which tries to define a certain problem as an existential threat, and an audience that accepts or rejects this attempt. Under this premise, security is considered a social construct, which has enormous consequences when it comes to its study.The analysis of the security agenda no longer consists of evaluating those threats considered real, but rather aims at the communicative processes through which actors and audiences agree to securitize an issue. The contributions of Balzacq (2005), Salter (2008) and Stritzel (2007;20l2), among others, have also broadened the objects of study of securitization, which have ceased to be exclusively texts of a political nature communicated in a linear manner to incorporate also the audience as an agent that interacts and participates in the creation of the securitizing discourse, the performance associated with the execution of the discourse or the interactivity of the discourse in socio-digital networks. However, despite this diversification in the approach to the study of securitization, most research continues to focus on texts belonging to political or media discourse.There is an absence of analysis of securitization in other types of texts, such as those of a legislative nature which are also interesting to study within the framework of these processes.That is, texts that, in many cases, give legislative coverage to the application of security policies and could represent the legal crystallization of previous political-media discourses. That said, given the legal nature of the texts examined in this article, it is important to make clear that the analysis proposed is, following the model of the Copenhagen School, a discursive analysis. This article does not carry out a legal analysis of the documents or a study on the legal consequences of the implementation of these laws, a study that would need another theoretical-methodological approach. Without conducting a legal analysis, we propose to observe the discursive construction of security that underlies the texts analyzed and the consequences that, according to the hypothesis of the Copenhagen School, this entails. Thus, the current analysis is about the securitization processes of the Covid-19 crisis.This health crisis has been one of the most disruptive episodes globally in recent decades. The unexpected appearance of the virus and its rapid spread made Covid-19, in just a few weeks, as UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres pointed out, the greatest threat to global security. The pandemic surpassed any of the established international protocols, and the lack of multilateral agreements between different countries and measures against the virus showed in turn a lack of global governance to deal with this type of threat. At first sight, we could say that Covid-19, an illness that, being new, poses a threat to the health of the entire world population since most people do not have immunity against it. However, this health crisis is once again a good scenario in which to observe that the threat is perceived and constructed in a very diverse way among the populatio .The study by Kirk (2022) on the securitization of Covid-19 in the United States refers to this. She analyzes the discursive battle between different security narratives about the health crisis in a country where the wearing or not wearing of a mask in public places often becomes an expression of a political position. The delimitation of the object of study to the examination of the texts of the Organic Law 4/1981 on states of alarm, exception, and siege, and (2) the Law 2/2021 of the Basque Parliament on measures for the management of the pandemic, is done for several reasons. In the first place, both texts, of an eminently legal nature, respond to the necessary characteristics to carry out the analysis in accordance with the objective of the study. Secondly, despite the substantial differences that both laws maintain in their preamble and the context of their drafting, the two texts have served as a legal framework for taking measures to deal with similar events, specifically, the crisis health of covid-19. This allows, following the proposal of the Copenhagen School, to contextualize the analysis of the securitization construction of the texts based on these facts. Third, the choice of texts, which share a legal framework, responds to the proposal to carry out an analysis of a state nature, and not an international one, given the prominence of state legislation in the coverage of policies and implementation of the security measures against the covid-19 disease because of the lack of international legal frameworks. The article is structured in three parts. In the first section, a brief theoretical-methodological approach is elaborated on the evolution of security research in the field of International Relations and to the theory of securitization developed bythe Copenhagen School. In the second, the context of the global health crisis and the case of Spain are described together with the securitization processes that accompany it.Thirdly, the documents examined and the operationalization that allows their analysis are presented. Subsequently, the discussion on the results and conclusions is addressed.

Racialized (Im)mobilities: The Pandemic and Sinophobia in Australia

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted countries all over the world, not only in relation to public health responses, but on multiple other societal levels. The pandemic has uncovered structural inequalities within and across societies and highlighted how race remains a powerful lens through which public policy responses are constructed and pursued. This paper examines (im)mobilities in Australia in the context of Asian, and more specifically Chinese-Australian citizens and residents, and how these have been framed in racialized discourses that justified exclusionary practices reminiscent of the White Australia ideology. The paper focuses on how Chinese Australians' mobilities have been (mis)represented and attacked in public and political discourse with particular attention to the situation of Chinese international students' (im)mobilities. Our conceptual attention in this paper, however, is not only on the racialization of mobilities but also immobilities, underpinned by an understanding of the relationality between Othered ‘migrants' and hosts, as well as between mobility and immobility. We conclude by discussing future patterns of mobility, how these will impact prospective migrants including international students, and what future forms of mobilities might mean for Australia as a country highly dependent on migrants for its economic, social and cultural development.

Modeling public perception in times of crisis: discursive strategies in Trump's COVID-19 discourse

The article presents an attempt to analyze the strategic perspective of discourse, applying Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) concepts and Crisis Communication analytical tools. The study aims to reveal key strategies employed by a political actor to form public perception while communicating a crisis, based on Donald Trump's discourse on the COVID-19 pandemic. Results suggest four groups of strategies: (1) legitimization (through emotions, altruism, a hypothetical future, voices of expertise, rationality, defeasibility, simple denial and bolstering), (2) delegitimization (through negative evaluations, accusations, sarcasm, nicknaming, attacking the accuser, shifting the blame), (3) mitigation (transcendence and differentiation) and (4) intensification (through the use of repetitions, metaphors, superlatives, intensifiers). The research concludes that the macro goal underlying the described strategies is to present the Trump administration's efforts to address the COVID-19 pandemic as hard and effective. The study illustrates the use of language to model public perception and construct meaning in the context of a crisis. The research findings contribute to prior scientific inquiry into discursive strategies through suggesting a more comprehensive typology and extending CDA classifications by Crisis Communication categories. © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Non-cooperative strategies in American political dialogic discourse (based on the press briefing genre)

The article presents results of analyzing the strategic dimension of dialogic discourse, with focus on non-cooperative communicative strategies employed by dialogue participants. The term "non-cooperative strategy" in this study is defined in a broad sense, namely, as a communicative strategy associated with a violation of principles underlying successful communicative cooperation, but not necessarily related to hostile rhetoric. In the present research, identifying non-cooperative strategies was based on Grice's cooperative principle and Leech's politeness principle. The analysis of dialogic discourse relied on Baranov and Kreydlin's concept of illocutionary necessitation which characterizes the relationship between utterances in a dialogue and suggests distinguishing between necessitating and necessitated dialogue utterances. Transcripts of press briefings held by Donald Trump and members of the Coronavirus Task Force in April 2020 were used as data for the research. A total of 10 press briefing transcripts were analyzed. The relevance of the study is due to the trend towards "legitimization" of verbal aggression, noted by some researchers of American political discourse. The article describes the most representative non-cooperative strategies revealed in the discourses under analysis, namely shifting the topic, logorrhea, ignoring, accusation, biting remark, reproach, control over the situation, delegitimization and objection. The study found that the functioning of some of the described strategies has a specific limitation in terms of the utterance type. Thus, the strategies of shifting the topic, ignoring and objection are confined to a necessitated utterance, while the strategies of accusation, biting remark, reproach, control over the situation and delegitimization can be implemented in both necessitating and necessitated utterances. Based on this finding, it is proposed to distinguish between bound and free non-cooperative strategies in dialogic discourse. The results of the study enrich the theory of dialogue by suggesting a typology of strategies for non-cooperative dialogic interaction based on the notion of illocutionary necessitation. Further scientific inquiry into communicative strategies in dialogic discourse will allow clarifying and expanding the conclusions drawn about the functional dependence of dialogic discourse strategies on the utterance type and about the possibility of distinguishing between bound and free strategies in dialogic interaction.

China's narrative of the fight against COVID-19: a case study of the representation of social actors in China Keywords

Since the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic, the Chinese political leadership has devoted substantial efforts to shape, through media and institutional discourses, a specific narrative of its response to the crisis, framing it as a fight in which the Chinese people, under the leadership of Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party, promptly came together to defeat the virus. The present paper examines this dominant narrative focusing on the Chinese language section on the fight against COVID-19 of the multilingual online platform China Keywords, a project run by State and Party-affiliated institutions. Drawing on the theoretical background and analytical tools from Critical Discourse Studies, the paper provides an analysis of the discursive representation of social actors constructed by this tool. The analysis shows how different discursive strategies employed to represent specific social actors contribute to reinforce the constitutive elements of the Chinese leadership's dominant narrative of the events of early 2020. Moreover, the paper argues that the section of China Keywords on the topic should be understood as one of the products of the multifaceted institutional efforts to "tell China's Covid-19 story well," both domestically and internationally. © 2022 Universita degli Studi di Milano. All rights reserved.

The power of language in political communication in times of COVID: Multilingual contrastive analysis of the speeches of Pedro Sánchez, Boris Johnson, Giuseppe Conte and Antonio Costa at the beginning of the pandemic

In this paper, within the framework of Applied Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, we will carry out a multilingual contrastive analysis of the speeches given by the political leaders of Spain, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Portugal at the beginning of 2020, when they announced tough measures to face the health crisis caused by COVID-19. Our initial hypothesis is that they will employ different linguistic resources to persuade the audience, since, at the beginning of the pandemic, political parties joined their forces to make citizens aware of the necessity of working together to face the crisis. The aim of our research is to use real samples of language to detect similarities and differences among the texts, as well as forms of persuasion and/or mass manipulation, and to observe if the sender's ideology is manifested in the discourse. To do so, the research will be based on a qualitative study of the four discourses, but complemented with the data provided by Sketch Engine, which includes the words and collocations most used in each corpus. The results show that, except for some slight differences in the way they appeal to fear, in general the four speeches use similar persuasion techniques, as part of messages that appeal to patriotism, unity in the fight against the virus, and social responsibility. © 2022 Universita degli Studi di Milano. All rights reserved.

El poder del lenguaje en la comunicación política en tiempos de COVID: análisis contrastivo multilingüe de los discursos de Pedro Sánchez, Boris Johnson, Giuseppe Conté y Antonio Costa en los inicios de la pandemia

In this paper, within the framework of Applied Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, we will carry out a multilingual contrastive analysis of the speeches given by the political leaders of Spain, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Portugal at the beginning of 2020, when they announced tough measures to face the health crisis caused by COVID-19. Our initial hypothesis is that they will employ different linguistic resources to persuade the audience, since, at the beginning of the pandemic, political parties joined their forces to make citizens aware of the necessity of working together to face the crisis. The aim of our research is to use real samples of language to detect similarities and differences among the texts, as well as forms of persuasion and/or mass manipulation, and to observe if the sender's ideology is manifested in the discourse. To do so, the research will be based on a qualitative study of the four discourses, but complemented with the data provided by Sketch Engine, which includes the words and collocations most used in each corpus. The results show that, except for some slight differences in the way they appeal to fear, in general the four speeches use similar persuasion techniques, as part of messages that appeal to patriotism, unity in the fight against the virus, and social responsibility. © 2022 Universita degli Studi di Milano. All rights reserved.

Non-cooperative strategies in American political dialogic discourse (based on the press briefing genre)

The article presents results of analyzing the strategic dimension of dialogic discourse, with focus on non-cooperative communicative strategies employed by dialogue participants. The term "non-cooperative strategy” in this study is defined in a broad sense, namely, as a communicative strategy associated with a violation of principles underlying successful communicative cooperation, but not necessarily related to hostile rhetoric. In the present research, identifying non-cooperative strategies was based on Grice's cooperative principle and Leech's politeness principle. The analysis of dialogic discourse relied on Baranov and Kreydlin's concept of illocutionary necessitation which characterizes the relationship between utterances in a dialogue and suggests distinguishing between necessitating and necessitated dialogue utterances. Transcripts of press briefings held by Donald Trump and members of the Coronavirus Task Force in April 2020 were used as data for the research. A total of 10 press briefing transcripts were analyzed. The relevance of the study is due to the trend towards "legitimization” of verbal aggression, noted by some researchers of American political discourse. The article describes the most representative non-cooperative strategies revealed in the discourses under analysis, namely shifting the topic, logorrhea, ignoring, accusation, biting remark, reproach, control over the situation, delegitimization and objection. The study found that the functioning of some of the described strategies has a specific limitation in terms of the utterance type. Thus, the strategies of shifting the topic, ignoring and objection are confined to a necessitated utterance, while the strategies of accusation, biting remark, reproach, control over the situation and delegitimization can be implemented in both necessitating and necessitated utterances. Based on this finding, it is proposed to distinguish between bound and free non-cooperative strategies in dialogic discourse. The results of the study enrich the theory of dialogue by suggesting a typology of strategies for non-cooperative dialogic interaction based on the notion of illocutionary necessitation. Further scientific inquiry into communicative strategies in dialogic discourse will allow clarifying and expanding the conclusions drawn about the functional dependence of dialogic discourse strategies on the utterance type and about the possibility of distinguishing between bound and free strategies in dialogic interaction. © 2022 Tomsk State University. All rights reserved.

Speech Impact in Political Discourse in Context of COVID-19 Pandemic (Speeches of B. Johnson and D. Biden)

The article is devoted to the study of pragmalinguistic means of political discourse. The material was transcriptions of speeches by British Prime Minister B. Johnson and US President D. Biden, published on the official websites of the governments of Great Britain and the United States. The authors set themselves the task of studying communication tactics that update the main directions of policy regarding COVID-19. The relevance of the work is due to the constructivist approach to the language. Political discourse is one of the ways to actualize power and control in society. The analysis revealed two groups of tactics that affect social consciousness and behavior: tactics of negative representation and tactics of positive representation. The tactics of negative representation of the pandemic include the following: emphasizing the threat, modeling a negative scenario, attracting negative experience. Positive representations are created through the use of tactics such as highlighting achievements, modeling a positive scenario, solidarity, appeals to duty, persuasion and appeal. It is shown that the linguistic means of updating the identified tactics have a targeted impact on the emotional sphere and on the consciousness of citizens, being a strong argument in favor of vaccination. The analysis carried out contributes to the understanding of the discursive mechanisms of influence on the mass consciousness.