Text und Stadt in der Pandemie. Zur funktionalen Klassifikation von öffentlichen Texten in der Coronakrise

Abstract

In times of the corona virus, social coexistence is changing in many spheres, including communication in the public space of cities. Communication reacted to interpersonal needs and expectations in multimodal texts with formal, content and functional design means. In this article, individual text types are classified to illustrate the functional spectrum of multimodal communication in the city. The qualitative analysis is based on photographed texts related to Corona from the LinguaSnappHamburg project (University of Hamburg). The approaches of Linguistic Landscapes, Urban Linguistics, Media Linguistic Landscapes and Semiotic Linguistics form an important pragmatic and theoretical background. They name relevant features and provide insights into city texts on which this study is based. Furthermore, views and characteristics of public texts before and during the pandemic are presented in order to develop a functional classification against this background. The classified text types include regulative, discursive, altruistic, social, declarative, and commercial texts, which sometimes have specific subtypes. They are discussed using relevant examples within the framework of multimodal form and content analysis. The text types and the analyses carried out capture a relevant section of communicative actions in the pandemic as well as social knowledge about the corona virus.