Imperativeness in Recommendations for Protection Against the Coronavirus

Abstract

In addition to changing the daily lives of the world population and strengthening internet communications, the COVID-19 pandemic has also influenced the language we use in daily communication. In this paper, on the example of recommendations for the prevention of the spread of the disease and protection of health issued by the National and Regional Civil Protection Headquarters, we focus on the morphosyntactic aspects of addressing the citizens. Qualitative analysis of the corpus reveals that different means of expressing imperativeness are used depending on the illocutionary strength of the message itself. The most frequent means are imperatives, particularly during certain stages of the fight against the coronavirus, which testifies to the severity of the situation (‘state of war’). Infinitives and infinitives accompanied by modal verbs such as ‘trebati’ (‘need’), ‘morati’ (‘must’), ‘valjati’ (‘must/should’) are also frequent means of expressing the expected reaction, and they are used when the recipient is irrelevant (depersonalised) and the sender wishes to downtone the imperativeness of the message. Depersonalised structures have also proven to be frequent in various decisions relating to the introduction and cessation of various measures. Polite means of expressing imperativeness are the least frequent among the identified means, which suggests the importance of understanding the message about protecting oneself and others, and even more importantly, of behaving in accordance with it.