Pandemic and Crisis Discourse : Communicating COVID-19 and Public Health Strategy

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a host of critical reflections about discourse practises dealing with public health issues. Situating crisis communication at the centre of societal and political debates about responses to the pandemic, this volume analyses the discursive strategies used in a variety of settings. Exploring how crisis discourse has become a part of managing the public health crisis itself, this book focuses on the communicative tasks and challenges for both speakers and their public audiences in seven areas: - establishment of discursive and political authority - official governmental and expert communication to the public - public understanding of government communication - legitimation of public health management as a 'war' - judging and blaming a collective other - cross-national comparison and rivalry - empathy and encouragement Covering global discourses from Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North and South America, and New Zealand, chapters use corpus-based data to cast light on these issues from a variety of languages. With crisis discourse already the object of fierce national and international debates about the appropriateness of specific communicative styles, information management and 'verbal hygiene', __Pandemic and Crisis Discourse__ offers an authoritative intervention from language experts. List of Figures -- List of Tables -- List of Contributors -- Introduction, Andreas Musolff, Ruth Breeze, Kayo Kondo and Sara Vilar-Lluch -- Part I: The Discourse of Authority in a Global Crisis: Who Defines (If There Is) a Pandemic? -- 1 COVID-19 Press Conferences Across Time: World Health Organization vs. Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Dennis Tay -- 2 Exploring the Multimodal Representation of COVID-19 on the Official Homepage of World Health Organization (WHO): A Social-Semiotic Approach, Amir H. Y. Salama -- 3 COVID-19 Representations in Political Statements: A Corpus-Driven Analysis, Alexandra Papamanoli and Themis P. Kaniklidou -- 4 How Autocrats Cope with the Corona Challenge: Belarus vs. Russia, Daniel Weiss -- 5 Counting Coronavirus: Mathematical Language in The UK Response to Covid-19, Lee Jarvis -- Part II: The Discourse of Crisis Management: How is the Public Meant to and How Does it Understand the Pandemic? -- 6 "Coronavirus Explainers" for Public Communication of Science: Everything the Public Needs to Know, María José Luzón -- 7 'COVID Warriors: An Analysis of the Use of Metaphors in Children's Books to Help them Understand Covid-19, María Muelas-Gil -- 8 Corona in the Linguistic Landscape, Neele Mundt and Frank Polzenhagen -- 9 Political Comedy and the Challenges of Public Communication during the Covid-19 Crisis: A Corpus-Based Study of Last Week Tonight's Coverage of the Pandemic, Virginia Zorzi -- 10 Social Reaction to a New Health Threat: The Perception of the COVID-19 Health Crisis by British and Spanish Readerships, Sara Vilar-Lluch -- 11 How to Pass this Exam? Dealing with COVID-19 through Metaphors in Turkish Online Public Discourse, Melike Bas and Esranur Efeoglu-Özcan -- Part III: The Discourse of 'War' against the Pandemic: How to 'Fight' COVID-19? -- 12 When Wars are Good: Emotional Unpacking Anti-Coronavirus Measures, Molly Xie Pan and Joanna Zhuoan Chen -- 13 Legitimising a Global Fight for a Shared Future: A Critical Metaphor Analysis of the Reportage of COVID-19 in China Daily, Yating Yu "The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a host of critical reflections about discourse practises dealing with public health issues. Situating crisis communication at the centre of societal and political debates about responses to the pandemic, this volume analyses the discursive strategies used in a variety of settings. Exploring how crisis discourse has become a part of managing the public health crisis itself, this book focuses on the communicative tasks and challenges for both speakers and their public audiences in seven areas: - establishment of discursive and political authority - official governmental and expert communication to the public - public understanding of government communication - legitimation of public health management as a 'war' - judging and blaming a collective other - cross-national comparison and rivalry - empathy and encouragement Covering global discourses from Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North and South America, and New Zealand, chapters use corpus-based data to cast light on these issues from a variety of languages. With crisis discourse already the object of fierce national and international debates about the appropriateness of specific communicative styles, information management and 'verbal hygiene', Pandemic and Crisis Discourse offers an authoritative intervention from language experts"-- Provided by publisher