Fear culture has become a central perspective of viewing life in Western societies where the feeling of vulnerability and insecurity has increased over the past few decades. Sociological studies on the culture of fear provide the theoretical background for understanding how the media coverage of the coronavirus outbreak helps to cultivate the audience's anxiety. The purpose of this article is to examine how the COVID-19 outbreak was presented in British newspapers and what language means were used to breed the anticipation of danger even before the first lethal case was registered in the UK, that is from January 1 to March 5, 2020. To identify the verbal means employed by newspapers to present the coronavirus as the ultimate threat and thus to cultivate a fear culture among their readers, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is chosen as the main method of the research, since it looks into how language means are used in media texts to produce an intended effect on audiences. The study reveals that the newspapers' editorials, headings, and articles of that period framed the coronavirus pandemic in terms of fear-mongering by dramatizing reports on the epidemic in China, by metaphorically presenting the coronavirus as deadly living thing approaching Great Britain and finally hitting the country like a tsunami, by repeatedly emphasizing the globality of the pandemic and inadequacy of the government's measure to curb the disease.

The research explores neologisms that have entered everyday English discourse during the coronavirus pandemic and formed so-called Coronaspeak. The analysis reveals that three approaches to neologisms are applicable to lexemes of Coronaspeak: the stylistic theory that is relevant to the words that used to be scientific terms but have been adopted by non-specialists, the etymological approach that regards as neologisms those new coinages that have developed a new meaning, and the denotational approach where neologisms are the lexemes created to nominate new concepts. Drawing on the assumption that language units verbalise cultural phenomena, the further study of Coronaspeak suggests that the modern English-speaking societies undergo a number of cultural changes: medicalisation of public discourse that originates from the government policy to engage the public in the struggle against COVID-19 as well as from using the pandemic as an argument in ideological and political conflicts; conceptualisation of the pandemic as a milestone, a turning point in history; introduction of new categories for social groups based on such criteria as health, profession, or attitude to the pandemic and socially responsible behaviour (e.g., clinically vulnerable people, key workers, covadults); development of new or modification of old cultural practices that embrace lifestyle (coronacocooing, WFH, drivecation), appearance (corona hair, coronabesity), patterns of online and offline communication (homeference, video party, coronadating, Wuhan shake); reconceptualisation of pre-pandemic concepts (home), and, finally, emergence of new types of interpersonal relations (coronarelationship, corona boyfriend).

The death of unarmed black male George Floyd, who was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis, May 25, 2020, has given momentum to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement whose activists rallied in different parts of the world to remove or deface monuments to historic figures associated with racism, slavery, and colonialism. These social practices of toppling statues have a discursive value and, since they are meant to communicate a message to the broader society, these actions are incorporated into a semiotic system. This study examines signs and, therefore, the system of representations involved in toppling statues performed by BLM activists and documented in photos. The research employs a critical approach to semiotics based on Roland Barthes' (1964) semiotic model of levels of signification. However, for a comprehensive analytical understanding, the study also makes use of a multidisciplinary Critical Discourse Analysis CDA approach which provides a systematic method to examine and expose power relations, inequality, dominance, and oppression in social practices. Besides its general analytical framework, the integrated CDA approach combines Fairclough's (1995) three-dimensional analytical approach, which presupposes examining text, discursive practice, and sociocultural practice, with Reisigl and Wodak's (2001, 2017) Discourse Historical Analysis (DHA), which investigates ideology and racism within their socio-cultural and historic context. The analysis of the images reveals a common thematic structure and encoded messages produced in order to change the cultural and social norms of the USA national discourse generated and cultivated within a specific ideological and historical context. These social actions consist of signs that make up a coherent communicative system which provides BLM activists with instruments in the struggle over the memory of slavery, white supremacy and oppression of the past for the rights of the black minority in the present in a better society of racial equality, human rights, and liberation.

The paper addresses the alteration strategies to be implied by a health care professional in the situation of breaking bad news in terms of patient-centered paradigm applied to modern medical communication agenda. The investigation is based on linguistic analysis through semantic framing of “breaking bad news” situation and is specified by onomasiological and semasiological interpretations. The conventional cognitive perception of “breaking bad news” situation is realized as one predetermined by invoked framing. The diversification of 'SPIKES' protocol with optional implementation of a cultural component is regarded as an effective educational medium in cross-cultural medical settings. In the paper the latter is employed as a valuable tool for modification of the way the participants view the situation. The modified protocol implicates the properties to influence the prospective treatment pattern. The interdisciplinary nature of the study outlines the valuable grounding for the shift from the mutually expressed negative attitudes to situational consistency via evoked experience of the medical professionals.

The research applies the relationship strategies and the image repair strategies frameworks to study and compare celebrities and microcelebrities’ communicative activity on social media during the lockdown in the USA and the UK in spring, 2020. For celebrities, the sample collected on social media in March – April, 2020, reveals qualitative changes: in the quarantine, first-rank celebrities attempted to reduce the assumed gap between themselves and their fans by using the strategies typically associated with microcelebrities, namely openness, positivity, task sharing, and assurance. If applied inappropriately, these strategies damaged the celebrities’ image and the famous chose either to take corrective actions or to ignore the communication failure. The microcelebrities’ messages during the lockdown did not show any qualitative shift: they held on to their typical openness, assurance and task sharing relationship maintenance strategies. Yet, the posts, where some microcelebrities, pursuing the openness strategy, sincerely reported their neglect of the quarantine restrictions, were more destructive to their image than similar posts from celebrities. The negative feedback affected microcelebrities communication on social media quantitatively and qualitatively: the number of messages dropped and the bloggers employed an extensive set of strategies to repair their image.   Received: 3 June 2021 / Accepted: 26 July 2021 / Published: 5 September 2021