Discourse & Society最新文献

COVID-19 has become a mental health pandemic. The impact on vulnerable demographic groups has been particularly severe. This paper focuses on women in employment in Hong Kong who have had to balance remote work and online schooling for over 2 years. Using semi-ethnography and theme-oriented discourse analysis, we examine 200 threads that concern members' mental health on a popular Facebook support group for mothers. We demonstrate that mental health messages are typically framed as 'troubles talk'. Other support group members actively align with a trouble-teller through 'caring responses', namely expressions of empathy and sympathy. These are realized through assessments of the trouble-teller's experience, reports of similar experiences; expressions of compassion and advice-giving. Mental health talk online is heavily mitigated, nevertheless the medium provides a space for expressing mental health troubles and providing informal psychosocial support. We advocate the importance of microanalytic discourse studies for mental health research to get insights into people's lived experiences during the pandemic.

Using a large-scale corpus of 706 coronavirus cartoons by male and female Arab artists, this study takes a fresh and more cognitive look at sexism in multimodal discourse. Specifically, it examines the role of salience and grammar (and hence of metaphor and metonymy) in gender bias and/or in discrimination against women. It argues that both men and women are vulnerable to the influence of stereotypical and outdated beliefs that create unconscious bias. But this raises the crucial issue of whether we can speak of 'overt' sexism in images. Issues around terminology and conceptualization are thus also investigated. Importantly, this paper makes the following contributions to feminist and cross-cultural pragmatics: (i) it brings a distinctly Arabic perspective to gender and language; (ii) it expands socio-cognitive pragmatics beyond spoken and written communication; (iii) it shows a close coupling between an Arabic grammar and other aspects of culture; and (iv) it has the potential for impact beyond academia, specifically in the sphere of coronavirus care or of health communication.

This paper discusses web-based public health discursive practices during the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in Nigeria. It utilises a multimodal discourse approach to explore how a combination of textual and visual resources was deployed to communicate informative and educative public health safety campaigns during the period. Essentially, this study discusses multimodal resources as a rhetorical technique for creating a public discursive engagement space designed to educate the public and mitigate the effect of the pandemic. The dataset was collected during and after the lockdown in 2020 (March-September) through media monitoring and manual downloading of relevant online COVID-19 posts, messages and public health advisories largely from WhatsApp platforms and the portals of some Nigerian national newspapers. Using insights from relevant approaches in discourse analysis (e.g. Multimodal Discourse and Critical Discourse Analysis), we adopted a qualitative content analysis approach to analyse on how online posts as multimodal resources amplify the role of social media affordances in producing and promoting public safety messages helped to control the spread and mitigate the effects of the pandemic. The study also shows that discursive and multimodal resources were deliberately deployed to increase the effectiveness of the technology-driven public health campaign. To a large extent, multimodal resources were found to complement lexico-semantic properties of online communication, where social media messages are created, crafted and reconstructed within a uniquely Nigerian public discourse context. The study further illustrates the increasing importance of web-based platforms as discursive sites for enacting and negotiating meanings during event-driven social activities and public engagement in the Global South.

In response to the threat of COVID-19, China initiated a nationwide campaign. Ideological work such as explaining the implemented policies and persuading the public always took a central role in mobilization, and it has been emphasized by Chinese government during Covid-19 as well. The legitimation discourse used in the campaign is the focus of the current study. The investigation takes into consideration the political logic of the relationship between the central and local governments as well as their working mechanism. More specifically, a total of 84 open letters written by the local governments to mobilize residents during the COVID-19 pandemic were analyzed. The study integrated the CDA perspective, legitimation theory, and campaign-style governance and examined what ideological discourses are constructed in the open letters, what type of authority is constructed for legitimation, and what is the main communication style used. In addition, the study paid attention to the patterns among the different local government ranks. The findings revealed that moral appeal and political authority were the key elements of legitimation discourse, but governments with lower ranks exhibited a trend of de-ideologization. Meanwhile, impersonal politeness and direct bold command contradictorily co-existed in open letters of basic level local governments. These finding reveal that despite the top government's centralized power, realization of ideological work in a national campaign is confined by the divergent and complicated realities of local governments.