No abstract

During pandemics, uncertainty is a given condition, as are the potential risks of which the public needs to be informed via the media. In such dire straits there tends to be a shortage of certain knowledge and an abundance of speculations that can potentially inform as well as misinform the public. In this study, we conduct a conversation analysis of the interactional dynamics of speculations between Danish journalists and health experts in televised news interviews and press conferences during the initial phase of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020. The analysis shows how journalists and experts construct and moderate speculations interactionally by entering both convergent and divergent roles. In conclusion, the potentials and pitfalls of such speculations are discussed, and implications are suggested for journalism practice.

This article presents a corpus linguistic analysis of the development in future-oriented political journalism in four Danish newspapers in the period 1997-2013 (N = 2954 full articles = 1,553,038 word tokens). Keyword analysis and concordance analysis are applied within a framework of grammatical-semantic theory of tense and modal verbs and semantic-pragmatic theory of time meaning, modality and speech acts. The results suggest, unexpectedly, that the newspapers -and news reports in particular -seem to have become less future-oriented in the period. At the same time, however, the articles -and particularly news commentary, in itself increasing -might have become slightly more speculative. Thus, the journalists themselves have become the main source of 'guessing', that is, predicting and speculating, with the keywords vil (will) and ville (would), including unreal and counterfactual speculations in the past tenses.

Danish university students are often criticised for a general lack of proficiency in orthography, punctuation and grammar in the academic register. However, there has been limited empirical substantiation to support the claim. In this paper, we present the results of a study of linguistic deviations in university assignments written by first-year Journalism and Danish students at the University of Southern Denmark (N = 100 students). The results show that the majority of both groups struggles with Danish orthography and punctuation when writing academically, which seems to confirm some of the assertions made by the critics. However, it is argued that the inherent conflict of orthographic and punctuation principles in Danish as well as the specific characteristics and challenges of academic writing are more probable causes than the claimed general decline in the writing proficiency of students.

This phenomenological enquiry into cyberspace examines the concept of space and metaphor, explaining ‘cyber'space as a figurative term and a figurative space, as something projected as a shared mental concept. Reception theory is used to theorize this figurative space as an ideational object constituted by a ‘text‐reader’ relationship. The performance of ‘cyber'space is described as a self‐reflexive ideation about meaning making itself, and examined as discursive, liminal, and transformative. Examination includes examples from e‐mail, chat, and 3D conference systems.