Communicating the unknown

Müller, Marcus; Bartsch, Sabine; Zinn, Jens O.

doi:10.1075/ijcl.21096.mul

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 27 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Hedges, as shown in Table 3, were significantly more frequent in the Covid‐19 highlights ( U = 51,090, z‐statistic = 3.3629, p < 0.001) which, to some extent, indicates academics’ awareness of the high degree of uncertainty surrounding research into the pandemic. Uncertainty is key to the social management of public health risk (Müller et al., 2021) and hedges point to the degree of caution that should be associated with claims. In the Covid highlights, hedges were more frequently used to express scientific possibility or predication and show considerable uncertainty about the potential measures that can be taken with the coronavirus pandemic.…”

Section: Stance: Results and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stance in article highlights: The promotion of Covid‐19 research

Zou,

Hyland

2023

Int J App Linguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Covid‐19 was the greatest public health crisis of a century, accounting for millions of deaths and initiating an urgent surge of published biomedical research. In this climate of social anxiety, researchers scrambled to publicize their work and achieve a medical breakthrough. The use of journal highlights, a brief bullet pointed list summarising the novel results of a study, is an important tool in this promotional endeavour. In this study we focus on the stance taken by authors in this genre by examining 300 highlights dealing with the virus and comparing them with 300 from articles in the same 16 journals on other issues. Our results show significantly greater use of stance markers in the Covid highlights with hedges, boosters and self‐mention particularly marked. Our study offers both a description of stance in highlights and an understanding of the potential impact of the intense, high‐stakes competition generated by the pandemic in biomedical publishing. We believe this offers a valuable contribution to the literature on stance, academic discourse and rhetorical persuasion.

show abstract

Section: Stance: Results and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stance in article highlights: The promotion of Covid‐19 research

Zou,

Hyland

2023

Int J App Linguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Studies that have examined the language of Covid-19 include works aiming to describe, for example, the use of uncertainty constructions in media discourse (Müller et al, 2021) or networked discourses of bereavement in online Covid-19 memorials (McGlashan, 2021). They have demonstrated that language "can provide evidence of social experiences of the pandemic" (Mahlberg and Brookes, 2021, p. 441).…”

Section: Theoretical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

The representations of freedom in The Sun newspaper between 2019 and 2021: A corpus-based study

Leone

2023

Topics in Linguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Existing studies have highlighted the close link between language and society (Fairclough, 1992) and demonstrated the impact of Covid-19 on language (Mahlberg and Brookes, 2021). There are no studies to date that have examined the changing representations and conceptual shifts of freedom in the pre-pandemic and post-pandemic years, which are expected to be affected by government policies on Covid-19. The present study aims to fill this gap. Specifically, the objective is to examine the conceptual evolution of freedom in the years 2019 and 2021 and to interpret it in the light of socio-historical issues derived from the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. The study is a corpus-based investigation undertaken on The Sun Corpus (TS), i.e. a self-compiled corpus including newspaper articles published in the UK during the years 2019 and 2021. Media including newspapers are, indeed, influential discourses that shape the public view of particular events, current issues, and play “an important role in framing how people understand and respond to” contextual happenings (Brookes and Baker, 2021, p. 1; see Baker et al. 2013). The analysis reveals that there is a shift in the use of the word freedom, which is depicted as an enjoyable experience in 2019 and seen in a negative shade in 2021. These results support the social conceptualization of language and reveal aspects that are of particular concern in Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1992), aiming to examine how socio-historical aspects frame the linguistic representations of social issues like the Covid-19 disease.

show abstract

“…The language used during the COVID-19 era can provide insight into these profound and far-reaching changes that resulted from the pandemic directly or indirectly. Linguistic research has explored public health messaging from the government and related agencies (e.g., Kalocsányiová et al, 2021 ; Strange, 2022 ) and the media (Jaworska, 2021 ; Müller et al, 2021 ; Semino, 2021 ; Yu et al, 2021 ; Kania, 2022 ; Bafort et al, 2023 ; Giorgis et al, 2023 ). A number of studies analyse COVID-19 signage communication, such as Tragel and Pikksaar ( 2022 ) and Bagna and Bellinzona ( 2023 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introducing the keyconcept approach to the analysis of language: the case of regulation in COVID-19 diaries

Robinson,

Sandow,

Piazza

2023

Front. Artif. Intell.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Using the Mass Observation corpus of 12th of May Diaries, we investigate concepts that are characteristic of the first coronavirus lockdown in the UK. More specifically, we extract and analyse concepts which are distinctive of the discourses produced in May 2020 in relation to concepts used in the 10 previous years, 2010–2019. In the current paper we focus on the concept of regulation, which we identify through a novel approach to querying semantic content in large datasets. Typically, linguists look at keywords to understand differences between two datasets. We demonstrate that taking the perspective of a keyconcept rather than the keyword in linguistic analysis is a beneficial way of identifying trends in broader patterns of thoughts and behaviours which reflect lived-experiences that are particularly prominent of a given dataset, which, in this current paper, is the COVID-19 era dataset. In order to contextualise the keyconcept analysis, we investigate the discourses surrounding the concept of regulation. We find that diarists communicate collective experience of limited individual agency, surrounded by feelings of fear and gratitude. Diarists' reporting on events is often fragmented, focused on new information, and firmly placed in a temporal frame.

show abstract

Communicating the unknown

Cited by 8 publications

References 27 publications

Stance in article highlights: The promotion of Covid‐19 research

Stance in article highlights: The promotion of Covid‐19 research

The representations of freedom in The Sun newspaper between 2019 and 2021: A corpus-based study

Introducing the keyconcept approach to the analysis of language: the case of regulation in COVID-19 diaries

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About