ABSTRACT
Meaning-making in any discourse is a nuanced or complex process which is ever-evolving and multifaceted. This study seeks to interrogate the linguistic and religious interpretations of COVID-19 pandemic discourse. The notions of the dialogic and polyphonic, in Bakhtin's theorisation of human discourse adopted in this chapter, underscore the importance of new hermeneutic traditions that embrace the polysemantic and polyvocal nature of COVID-19 discourses. Bakhtinian philosophy of language problematises the idea of a single reality or monolithic conceptualisation, but rather embraces multiperspectivality, contradictions and diversity in the interpretive process. Drawing from Bakhtin's dialogic and polyphonic notions, this chapter argues that the reception, interpretation and comprehension of meaning with regard to the pandemic depend on a linguistic composition of a particular discourse and the religious perception that one subscribes to. Most importantly, the claim to stable meanings disregards subjectivity and variability that come with diverse linguistic and religious interpretations in different contextual circumstances. Thus, the major thrust of this study is to explore and reflect on the linguistic framing and religious understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic in Zimbabwe. The findings from this chapter demonstrate that interpreting the COVID-19 pandemic involves an interpretive process that is open-ended and ever-evolving in new contexts that demand constant re-reading. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
This article attempts to create a cognitive definition of the meaning of the Polish lexeme koronaparty on the basis of experimental data obtained among Polish students through a survey. The experiment was conducted in February 2021. Fifty students took part in it. First, they answered the question: What do you think the word koronaparty means? Second, they built sentences including the korona-party lexeme. As a result, 53 responses were obtained and 46 sentences were made with the use of the koronaparty lexeme. The collected data allowed for the preparation of a synthetic cognitive definition of the meaning of the word. The categorial semantic feature of the koronaparty is the occurrence of the event during the pandemic. The meaning of koronaparty may include as follows: 1. "social gathering at high risk of developing Covid-19: with the participation of people infected with Covid-19, without sanitation requirements and restrictions / usually secret / live”;2. "social gathering during which sanitary requirements and restrictions are respected: open and live, e.g. a wedding with a limited number of people, going to the theatre or to a concert with a face mask and social distance, etc.”;3. "online social gathering (via Zoom, Skype, FaceTime etc.), official cultural event (e.g. concert, per-formance, etc.) or private gathering such as watching movies and/or drinking alcohol together”. © 2023, Ksiegarnia Akademicka Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: The psychosocial needs and risks of children with cancer and their families are well-documented including increased risk of parental distress, posttraumatic stress, and anxiety. There is a critical need to provide evidence-based psychosocial care to parents and caregivers of children with cancer. Digital health interventions are important to address many barriers to in-person intervention delivery but are not widely used in pediatric psychosocial cancer care. The COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced the need for flexible, acceptable, and accessible psychosocial digital health interventions. The Electronic Surviving Cancer Competently Intervention Program (eSCCIP) is an innovative digital health intervention for parents and caregivers of children with cancer, delivered through a combination of self-guided web-based content and supplemented by 3 telehealth follow-up sessions with a trained telehealth guide. A Spanish language adaptation of eSCCIP, El Programa Electronico de Intervencion para Superar Cancer Competentemente (eSCCIP-SP), has been developed. The self-guided web-based cores of eSCCIP/eSCCIP-SP are a mix of didactic video content, multifamily video discussion groups featuring parents of children with cancer, and hands-on web-based activities. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study is to test eSCCIP/eSCCIP-SP in a multisite randomized controlled trial, compared to an internet-based education control condition consisting of information specifically focused on concerns relevant to parents and caregivers of children with cancer. METHODS: Using a randomized controlled clinical trial design, 350 eligible parents and caregivers of children with cancer will be randomly assigned to the intervention (eSCCIP/eSCCIP-SP) or an education control condition. Data will be collected at 3 time points: preintervention (prior to randomization), immediately post intervention (after 6 weeks), and at a 3-month follow-up (from baseline). Participants randomized to either condition will receive study material (eSCCIP/eSCCIP-SP intervention or education control website) in English or Spanish, based on the primary language spoken in the home and participant preference. RESULTS: The primary study end point is a reduction in acute distress from baseline to postintervention, with secondary end points focused on reductions in symptoms of posttraumatic stress and anxiety, and improvements in coping self-efficacy and cognitive coping. An additional exploratory aim will be focused on implementation strategies and potential costs and cost-savings of eSCCIP/eSCCIP-SP, laying the groundwork for future trials focused on dissemination and implementation, stepped-care models, and intervention refinement. CONCLUSIONS: This trial will provide necessary data to evaluate the efficacy of eSCCIP/eSCCIP-SP. This intervention has the potential to be an easily scalable and highly impactful psychosocial treatment option for parents and caregivers of children with cancer. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05294302; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT05294302. INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID): PRR1-10.2196/46339.
ABSTRACT
Neologisms refer to newly coined words or phrases adopted by a language, and it is a slow but ongoing process that occurs in all languages. Sometimes, rarely used or obsolete words are also considered neologisms. Certain events, such as wars, the emergence of new diseases, or advancements like computers and the internet, can trigger the creation of new words or neologisms. The COVID-19 pandemic is one such event that has rapidly led to an explosion of neologisms in the context of the disease and several other social contexts. Even the term COVID-19 itself is a newly coined term. Studying such adaptation or change and quantifying it is essential from a linguistic perspective. However, identifying newly coined terms or extracting neologisms computationally is a challenging task. The standard tools and techniques for finding newly coined terms in English-like languages may not be suitable for Bengali and other Indic languages. This study aims to use a semi-automated approach to investigate the emergence or modification of new words in the Bengali language amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. To conduct this study, a Bengali web corpus was compiled consisting of COVID-19 related articles sourced from various web sources in Bengali. The current experiment focuses solely on COVID-19-related neologisms, but the method can be adapted for general purposes and extended to other languages as well.
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The multi-granular probabilistic linguistic modeling allows decision makers to express cognitive information using multiple linguistic term sets based on their preferences. However, personalized individual semantics (PIS) can lead to different meanings of the same word within the linguistic context. To address this issue and manage consensus in large-scale group decision making, this study proposes a decision framework that employs multi-granular probabilistic linguistic preference relations (MGPLPRs). First, a transformation method is presented to unify different granularity levels of MGPLPRs, thus ensuring the consistency of granularity. Moreover, a consistency-driven optimization model is constructed to generate the numerical scales with PIS for different experts. Thereafter, a two-stage consensus reaching process (CRP) is developed, including both within-cluster and across-cluster CRP, to achieve group consensus. The experts' original weights are derived from a social network, taking into account the trust relationships among them. A dynamic weighting mechanism is used to update the experts' weights based on their contributions to group consensus, which better reflects the actual situation than fixed weights. The proposed method is exemplified through a case study of assessing and selecting campus surveillance measures for COVID-19. Finally, the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework are verified through comparative analysis and sensitivity analysis.
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This paper examines how the situation caused by COVID-19 impacted the use of a well-entrenched word in Japanese: masuku 'mask'. An inspection of data gathered from an online newspaper shows a sharp increase in token and type frequency in the use of complex words with masuku 'mask' in 2020 (mid-pandemic) compared to 2019 (pre-pandemic), implying the recurrence and variegation of mask-related topics in the media. Focusing on the varied types of complex words containing masuku 'mask', the paper offers a construction morphology account of how they distribute within a network of words. The most dominant means to expand the network was compounding, creating not only hyponyms of masuku 'mask' (i.e., using masuku as the head of the compound, as in ago-masuku 'chin mask') but also hyponyms of other well-entrenched words (i.e., using masuku as the non-head, as in masuku-gimu 'mask obligation'). Beyond compounding, a playful use of language in blends led to the creation of a new path, albeit a small one. The paper argues the development of the word network involved both mundane and exceptional creativity.
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In times of the Covid-19 pandemic, the use of online platforms for teaching purposes accelerated, and remote learning and teaching gained ground in the field of Translation & Interpreting Studies (TIS). In this paper, we discuss the curriculum design of JurDist, a master's course in legal translation, which has been offered as an online course for the language combinations Norwegian - English/French/German/Spanish since 2013. We describe, in detail, today's curriculum and discuss modifications to the teaching, implemented in the spring semester of 2021. The modifications aim at improving the students' performance in accordance with current research in translation theory (i.e., translation competence development) and in line with current approaches to learning and teaching (e.g., taxonomies describing different levels and kinds of understanding). Consequently, the curriculum design and the modified approach to teaching aim at enhancing the students' professional skills in the field of legal translation. Although this teaching approach is applicable to both online teaching and the physical classroom, we describe its implementation in an online teaching environment only. Online teaching in all its facets has come to stay, also within TIS. We contribute to this development with our experience in teaching specialized translation online since 2013, which predates the recent pandemic.
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A longitudinal psycholinguistic study was conducted with 107 students from different Italian universities that produced daily photo-diary entries for two weeks, one at the beginning and the other at the end of the first Italian lockdown period, imposed in view of the rapid dissemination of COVID -19. The task was to take a daily photo accompanied by a short description (text). The texts accompanying the photos were analysed using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software to analyze linguistic markers representing psychological processes related to the experience of the pandemic and the lockdown, identifying potential changes in psycholinguistic variables useful for understanding the psychological impact of such harsh and extended restricted living conditions on Italian students. LIWC categories related to negation, anger, cognitive mechanisms, tentative discourse, past, and future increased statistically significantly between the two time points, while word count, prepositions, communication, leisure, and home decreased statistically significantly. While male participants used more articles at both time points, females used more words related to anxiety, social processes, past, and present at T1 and more related to insight at T2. Participants who lived with their partner showed higher scores on negative emotions, affect, positive feelings, anger, optimism, and certainty. Participants from southern Italy tended to describe their experiences from a collective and social perspective rather than an individual perspective. By identifying, discussing, and comparing these phenomena with the broader literature, a spotlight is shed for the first time on the psycholinguistic analysis of students at the national level who faced the first COVID -19 lockdown in Italy.
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Penang is often known as a multilingual and multiethnic city in Malaysia. Its diversity of growing population based on its pre-colonial history and evidence of different ethnic groups living together has resulted in an emergence of a variety of languages today. Henceforth, this chapter embarks on an examination of languages that appear on public health signs in Penang. Conceptualising the study within the framework of language planning and policy, it dissects the languages observed on COVID-19 related signs that were designed by the multiple layers of agency in Penang. The findings are hierarchically organised as follows: (a) state government, (b) district government, (c) large enterprise, and (d) small enterprise. Although a trend of dynamism is reflected in the findings, they still mark social inequality for people's access to public advice related to the COVID-19 outbreak in Penang. The chapter concludes that the linguistic landscape of Penang is a mosaic closely connected to the social and political processes and urges for an increased use of community languages to safeguard vulnerable groups in Penang and across the globe. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.
ABSTRACT
This article describes the changing linguistic landscape on the North Shore of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, during the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic. I present an account of the visual representation of change along the area's parks and trails, which remained open for socially-distanced exercise during the province's lockdown. Following the principles of visual, walking ethnography, I walked through numerous locations, observing and recording the visual representations of the province's policies and discourses of lockdown and social distancing. Examples of change were most evident in the rapid addition to social space of top-down signs, characterised mainly by multimodality and monolingualism, strategically placed in ways that encouraged local people to abide by social-distancing. However, through this process of observation and exploration, I noticed grassroots semiotic artefacts such as illustrated stones with images and messages that complemented the official signs of the provincial government. As was the case with the official signs and messages, through a process of discursive convergence, these grassroots artefacts performed a role of conveying messages and discourses of social distancing, public pedagogy, and community care.
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Recent linguistic landscape studies have increasingly underscored an online-offline agenda to understand the entanglement of people's digital and physical lifeworlds. In this light, this study concerns itself with the diasporic space lived online by Chinese overseas students residing in the UK during COVID, taking it as a nexus of their experienced semiotic landscape and practiced landscaping. Drawing on research diaries and interviews collected during a stretched time of fieldwork and observations, this research delineates shared semiotic landscapes shaped by homogeneous attention structure and health beliefs in the digital lifeworlds of Chinese overseas students during the pandemic. The shared semiotic landscapes reterritorialize the idea of local space in digital infrastructures, and constitute an online community space where cultural identities are articulated and practiced. By advocating the analytical strength of linguistic landscape in digital settings, this study articulates and makes sense of the social-semiotic dynamics of a discrete diasporic group specifically conditioned by COVID on a broader spatial level. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of Multilingual & Multicultural Development is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the whole world quite seriously. The number of new infectious cases and death cases are rapidly increasing over time. In this study, a theoretical linguistic fuzzy rule-based susceptible-exposed-infectious-isolated-recovered (SEIIsR) compartmental model has been proposed to predict the dynamics of the transmission of COVID-19 over time considering population immunity and infectiousness heterogeneity based on viral load in the model. The model's equilibrium points have been calculated, and stability analysis of the model's equilibrium points has been conducted. Consequently, the fuzzy basic reproduction number, R0f, of the fuzzy model has been formulated. Finally, the temporal dynamics of different compartmental populations with immunity and infectiousness heterogeneity using the fuzzy Mamdani model are delineated, and some disease control policies have been suggested to get over the infection in no time. Copyright © 2022, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
ABSTRACT
The outbreak of epidemic has had a big impact on the investment market of China. Facing the turbulence in the investment market, many enterprises find it difficult to judge the development prospects of investment projects and make the right investment decisions. The three-way decisions offer a novel study perspective to solve this problem. Then the developed model is applied to select the investment projects. Firstly, some relevant attributes of the project are described with the double hierarchy hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets. And a double hierarchy hesitant fuzzy linguistic information system is constructed for each project. Secondly, the weights of attributes are determined with the Choquet integral method. And the closeness degree calculated by Choquet-based bi-projection method is taken as the conditional probability that the project will be profitable. Next, considering the influence of the bounded rationality of decision makers, the threshold parameters are calculated based on prospect theory. Finally, the decision results about investment projects during four stages are deduced based on the principle of maximum-utility, which demonstrates the practicability and effectiveness of the proposed model.
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BACKGROUND: COVID-19 has highlighted already existing human resource gaps in health care systems. New Brunswick health care services are significantly weakened by a shortage of nurses and physicians, affecting regions where Official Language Minority Communities (OLMCs) reside. Since 2008, Vitalité Health Network (the "Network"), whose work language is French (with services delivered in both official languages, English and French), has provided health care to OLMCs in New Brunswick. The Network currently needs to fill hundreds of vacant physician and nurse positions. It is imperative to strengthen the network's retention strategies to ensure its viability and maintain adequate health care services for OLMCs. The study is a collaborative effort between the Network (our partner) and the research team to identify and implement organizational and structural strategies to upscale retention. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study is to support one of New Brunswick health networks in identifying and implementing strategies to promote physician and registered nurse retention. More precisely, it wishes to make 4 important contributions to identify (and enhance our understanding of) the factors related to the retention of physicians and nurses within the Network; determine, based on the "Magnet Hospital" model and the "Making it Work" framework, on which aspects of the Network's environment (internal or external) it should focus for its retention strategy; define clear and actionable practices to help the Network replenish its strength and vitality; and improve the quality of health care services to OLMCs. METHODS: The sequential methodology combines quantitative and qualitative approaches based on a mixed methods design. For the quantitative part, data collected through the years by the Network will be used to take stock of vacant positions and examine turnover rates. These data will also help determine which areas have the most critical challenges and which ones have more successful approaches regarding retention. Recruitment will be made in those areas for the qualitative part of the study to conduct interviews and focus groups with different respondents, either currently employed or who have left it in the last 5 years. RESULTS: This study was funded in February 2022. Active enrollment and data collection started in the spring of 2022. A total of 56 semistructured interviews were conducted with physicians and nurses. As of manuscript submission, qualitative data analysis is in progress and quantitative data collection is intended to end by February 2023. Summer and fall 2023 is the anticipated period to disseminate the results. CONCLUSIONS: Applying the "Magnet Hospital" model and the "Making it Work" framework outside urban settings will offer a novel outlook to the knowledge of professional resource shortages within OLMCs. Furthermore, this study will generate recommendations that could contribute to a more robust retention plan for physicians and registered nurses. INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID): DERR1-10.2196/41485.
ABSTRACT
While we often think of words as having a fixed meaning that we use to describe a changing world, words are also dynamic and changing. Scientific research can also be remarkably fast-moving, with new concepts or approaches rapidly gaining mind share. We examined scientific writing, both preprint and pre-publication peer-reviewed text, to identify terms that have changed and examine their use. One particular challenge that we faced was that the shift from closed to open access publishing meant that the size of available corpora changed by over an order of magnitude in the last two decades. We developed an approach to evaluate semantic shift by accounting for both intra- and inter-year variability using multiple integrated models. This analysis revealed thousands of change points in both corpora, including for terms such as 'cas9', 'pandemic', and 'sars'. We found that the consistent change-points between pre-publication peer-reviewed and preprinted text are largely related to the COVID-19 pandemic. We also created a web app for exploration that allows users to investigate individual terms ( https://greenelab.github.io/word-lapse/ ). To our knowledge, our research is the first to examine semantic shift in biomedical preprints and pre-publication peer-reviewed text, and provides a foundation for future work to understand how terms acquire new meanings and how peer review affects this process.
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In an increasingly complex and uncertain decision-making environment, large-scale group decision-making (LSGDM) can offer a more efficient method, allowing a large number of decision-makers (DMs) to truly participate in the decision-making process. The consensus-reaching process (CRP) is an effective method for resolving conflicting opinions among large-scale DMs. However, in the existing CRP of LSGDM, the new consensus state and the adjustment cost borne by inconsistent DMs after implementing feedback suggestions are not taken into consideration. To address this issue, this paper proposes a global optimization feedback model with particle swarm optimization (PSO) for LSGDM in hesitant fuzzy linguistic environments. An improved density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) on hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets (HFLTSs) is introduced to classify large-scale DMs into several clusters, and a weight determination method that combines cluster size and intra-cluster tightness is also presented. The consensus degree of clusters is calculated at two levels: intra-consensus and inter-consensus. To improve the global consensus level with minimum cost, a global optimization feedback model is established to generate recommendation advice for inconsistent DMs, and the model is solved by PSO. A numerical example related to "COVID-19” and some comparisons are provided to verify the feasibility and advantages of the proposed method.
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The present study deals with the use of gender-inclusive language on hygiene notices that were placed on public facilities (shops, banks, churches, museums) on the Dolna Street and SNP Square in Banska Bystrica (Slovakia) during the coronavirus pandemic. This phenomenon is examined in the context of the pandemic situation caused by the Coronavirus, as well as in the context of the current European gender policy and the application of gender-inclusive language in Slovakia. For the sake of comparison, attention is also paid to hygiene notices in Munich (Germany).
ABSTRACT
This article examines the peculiarities of the public advertising discourse of five cultures (Russia, the USA, the UK, France, and Australia) based on advertising campaigns concerning the COVID-19 pandemic. The main object of the research is poly-code structures that contain the interaction of multilevel and multidimensional components that appeared as a result of an interaction of elements belonging to different semiotic systems, both verbal and visual. The authors carry out complex multilevel discourse analysis, paying close attention to structural, semantic, communicative, and pragmatic features, including conceptual space. The article explores factors that ensure the efficiency of such influence on the mass addressee due to existing social procurement, taking a closer look at the pragmatics of lexical and grammatical means in the chosen interaction strategy of verbal and visual components in Russian and non-Russian social advertising texts. The author also studies the mechanisms of influence in various cognitive processes that are part of information perception and processing and analyses linguo-creative parameters of such texts, such as pragmatic aspects of the use of wordplay and its influence on the semantic structure of an advertising text. The research makes it possible to detect the semantic mechanisms of the increasing communicative effectiveness of public advertising. The structural and semantic compression that plays an important role in it is possible thanks to the use of nonverbal expressive means: print text features (size, colour, and other features of the font, kerning, and typography), expressive images, and their interaction with the printed text. The functioning of advertising texts is connected with a whole series of basic concepts that appear in advertising space, get into the public and personal mentality, and modify it. On the other hand, to increase their impact, advertisements use a range of pervasive stereotypes that can be observed in the way brands react to social changes in their logos and slogans.
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Overtourism has a number of negative impacts on both the attractiveness of tourist destinations and the life of local residents. The period of tourism that converged to almost nothing due to the outbreak and global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic is a suitable time for examining residents' perceptions of (over)tourism. In this study, the research question focuses on the impact of overtourism on the residential well-being of local communities. Answering the questions that arise from the theoretical positioning, involving developing knowledge of the related impacts, is important because such new patterns of behavior may become commonplace. Sentiment analysis was chosen to answer the research questions and proved to be a good tool for exploring the impacts of overtourism perceived by local residents in an unconventional way. Through sentiment analysis based on neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) methodology, three key aspects of human experience - neurology, language, and programming - became the focus of investigation.The results, based on 13,145 comments show which sensory perceptions transmitted by representational systems - such as sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell - were more significant in the case of the examined keywords. For all keywords, regardless of the annual distribution, employment of the visual representation system (which represents visual modalities) was prominent, followed by the olfactory representation system representing olfactory modalities. The use of auditory-related acoustic, perceptual kinesthetic, and taste-like gustatory representation systems appears to have been less important and nearly equal in terms of the records that were examined. By understanding the correlation between overtourism and residential well-being, non-governmental-organizations and local municipal governments - which provides housing for residents - can more effectively shape the factors that influence residential well-being, while local residents who are exposed to the environmental impacts of tourism can also play an important role in shaping their own residential well-being.
ABSTRACT
This study examines how the linguistic landscape of a university in the midwestern United States has changed since the COVID-19 pandemic, and how that change has discursively constructed the identities of the university and its community. The focus lies in the newly displayed semiotics that provides information about preventing the virus from spreading. By analysing public signs such as flyers, posters, and banners whose contents have to do with COVID-19, this study found the following five ways in which the institution and community express their identities and voices. The university's identity has shifted to that of an agent that acts to encourage a united effort to protect itself and its community;a caring entity that cares about community members;a site for community members' voice expression;a space creator to expand interaction from physical to online discourses;and an information deliverer for international members of the community. This study calls for research that investigates the global pandemic's influence on the linguistic landscape.