COVID‐19 in the news: The first 12 months

ABSTRACT

The year 2020 was the year of COVID‐19. In this paper we seek to identify the changing concerns of the international press to unfolding events of the COVID pandemic throughout 2020. Based on a 12.3‐million‐word corpus, we explore keyword nouns and verbs and frequent noun phrases to understand the central concerns of the public reflected in its news media. Results show that news in the early months was dominated by the symptoms of the virus, with items relating to controlling the disease such as guidelines, protocols and, eventually, vaccine, becoming increasingly prominent. Dominant keyword verbs base, infect, and announce concerned different activities associated with reporting the pandemic. This corpus‐assisted linguistic description helps guide our reading of the changing public interest in the pandemic. (English) [ FROM AUTHOR] 摘要 2020 年是新冠肺炎肆虐的一年。在这一年中, 疫情带来巨大困扰, 引发对医疗、政治、经济和社会等各个领域的冲击。本文试图追踪 2020 年新冠疫情新闻随事态发展而变更的焦点。基于新冠疫情语料库 (Davis, 2021) 的 1230 万词符子集, 本研究考察语料库的主题名词、主题动词以及高频名词短语, 进而识解新冠疫情新闻语篇中公众聚焦的舆论旨趣。结果表明早期新闻围绕病毒的患病症状展开, 主题名词与控制疫情有关, 包括 guidelines、protocols 和 vaccine, 而主题动词指涉对疫情的报道, 包括 base、infect 和 announce。语料库辅助下聚焦新冠疫情的语言分析有助于揭示持续发展的新闻故事以及公众舆论的关注点。关键字新冠疫情, 新闻语篇, 主题名词, 主题动词, 名词短语 (Chinese) [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of International Journal of Applied Linguistics is the property of Wiley-Blackwell 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.)