Risk and Threat during the Covid-19 Pandemic: a Micro-Diachronic Perspective.

Communicating risk during the Covid-19 pandemic Since the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak, media content has focused on issues related to the virus, ranging from scientific and medical information (i.e. structure of the virus, effects, vaccines, etc.) to safety measures and government restrictions (i.e. lockdown, curfews, use of masks, etc.). Covid-19 discourse has raised much interest in academia, both in linguistics and the social sciences especially concerning the frequently used metaphor of war (Sabucedo et al 2020, Wagener 2020, Castro Seixas 2021, Panzeri et al. 2021, Taylor 2021). Other studies have focused on the communication of risk during Covid-19 from a health perspective to address eventual gaps in the interaction between doctors and virologists and patients and non-experts (Abrams and Greenhawt 2020, Chesser et al. 2020). However, to our knowledge risk is yet to be studied from a linguistic perspective. The aim of this paper is to analyse how risk was conveyed in newspapers and on online magazines during 2020. More specifically, we present a diachronic analysis of the words risk and threat in the Coronavirus Corpus which was created to keep record of the economic, social and political impact of the pandemic. By tracing changes (if there are any) in frequency and meaning over the months, we aim at identifying collocates and phraseology used to convey issues related to risk and virus menace since the start of the outbreak. Results will shed light on the communication of risk and on significant patterns associated to the semantic field of threat during a health emergency

Variations of polyphony in blogs

This paper looks at dialogicity in the Slow Art Day blog and focuses on the way the representation of participants encodes the complexity of the communicative action through a polyphony of textual voices. By focusing on posts from the pandemic years (2020 and 2021), and contrasting them with the previous period, we carry out a collocation analysis and a study of semantic preferences (Sinclair 2004) to explore how writers present themselves and how they interact with the reader and other textual voices in a context of cultural intermediation. By looking at forms of address and of self-mention, we trace how this blog enacts different forms of dialogic action with its readers and stakeholders in the extended situational context

New concepts and meanings of slow. The case of Slow Art

The present study explores new meanings and values of the word slow in the context of Slow Art Day, a global event that takes place once a year and whose aim is to encourage both visitors and museum curators to engage with art in new and different ways. Since 1989 and the early days of Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food Movement, the concept of slowness has become a relevant and ethical topic that is often related to what is organic, local and sustainable. While the notion and impact of slowness have been studied in different areas such as food (Petrini 2003), media (Rauch 2011), medicine (Wear et al. 2015) and education (O’Neill 2014), museums are yet to be investigated in depth. Through the lens of Appraisal Theory (Martin, White 2005) and corpus linguistics (Sinclair 2004), I focus on a diachronic study of the language of evaluation adopted in the Slow Art Day official blog, which keeps a record of the reports of the museums that take part in the yearly event. By using both a quantitative and qualitative approach, I focus on how appraisal is used to enhance and promote the new and different semantic dimensions related to slowness. My analysis of the Slow Art Day blog will illustrate how slowness is no longer related to the semantic dimension of Time, but also to those of Wellbeing and Inclusiveness, while a close study of evaluative language will show how these dimensions are interconnected to one another

Boosting Booster Trust: Negotiating a Jungle of Misinformation

Abstract Misinformation, disinformation, and fake news are available across diverse media, causing distrust in governmental and health institutions. In this context, the use of language has been of great interest in research, specifically in health communication, on social media, and in traditional news media. Our aim is to analyse and compare how the successive doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been presented in different forms of knowledge communication, namely scientific research papers and the media, including online magazines and newspaper articles. By focusing on frequency, collocates, and phraseology of booster and dose, we trace differences in how boosters are presented in both lay and professional contexts of communication. Scientific discourse shows a marked preference for the more neutral and cautious term dose, which is also associated with the description of administration procedures. News discourse is characterised both by a higher incidence of the word booster (implying a reinforcement of an already existing immunity) and by the choice of referring to the institutional voices recommending vaccines. Results shed light on how different discourses manifest their perceived functions through lexical choice, as well as how news discourse uses and reinterprets scientific discourse in the light of what is relevant to the audience

Showcasing Motorbikes and Sewing Machines: Promotional Language on Husqvarna Websites

How do companies that produce highly diverse merchandise promote their different goods and how do they target them to their consumers? The Husqvarna brand is known for containing several divisions that manufacture a wide range of products from motorbikes to chainsaws and sewing machines. Each of these companies has its own dedicated webpage, which represents an important space for self-promotion and presentation of the characteristics of their products. However, while Husqvarna has been widely studied in terms of marketing and corporate social responsibility, whether the brand’s promotional strategies relative to the diverse products are more or less the same or change accordingly remains to be investigated. The present study sets out to fill this gap by examining how motorbikes and sewing machines are described and promoted on the respective Husqvarna websites by looking at branding, targeting, and promotional language. In order to carry out our analysis, we created two corpora from the official US Husqvarna Motorcycles and Sewing Machines websites. The two corpora have been analysed following both a quantitative and qualitative approach, combining corpus linguistics and appraisal theory (Martin and White 2005). This case study will yield insights on how multidivisional companies promote their different products and how they target them for their different audiences

Academic writing conventions in English-medium linguistics journals in Italy: Continuity and change over the last 30 years

Against the background of studies on “academic Englishes”, this paper is a study parallel to Dontcheva-Navratilova (this issue). Focusing on the use of English in Italian academic publishing and on English linguistics in particular, we look at the development of academic writing conventions in research articles written by Italian scholars over the last 30 years. The study is based on a small corpus of 20 single-authored English-medium research articles – ten representing the period from 1990 to1995 and ten from between 2014 and 2019 – published in the official journal of the Italian association of Anglicists (Textus) and in the applied linguistics journal Rassegna Italiana di Linguistica Italiana (RILA). The study draws on genre analysis to explore possible changes in rhetorical structure and on corpus analysis to study forms of self-mention. Special attention is paid to introductions, methodology, and conclusions. At a macrolevel, results show diachronic changes in rhetorical structure with a clearer IMRAD structure and a more empirical methodology in the second phase, while at a microlevel forms of self-mention show a marked increase in non-personal and implicit (locational) self-mention. This seems to respond to the tension between personal and impersonal forms that has largely characterized the development of the genre in English as well as to the contact between different academic cultures

"Have a slow and wonderful day!" L’utilizzo della parola “slow” in italiano ed in inglese e le sue sfumature nel contesto dello Slow Art.

Per risparmiare tempo ed aumentare la produttività delle attività economiche, il progresso tecnologico ha cambiato il nostro modo di operare e di vivere rendendoci sempre più proni al multitasking. Tuttavia, ai nuovi ritmi frenetici imposti dall’avvento delle nuove tecnologie, fanno fronte nuovi movimenti sociali che si sono contrapposti alla cultura della velocità dell'attuale società moderna. Ad esempio, lo Slow Food Movement, fondato da Carlo Petrini nel 1986, ha introdotto il concetto di lentezza non solo in termini culinari, di gusto e di piacere della “la tavola”, ma ha diffuso questo concetto anche in altri ambiti. I nuovi ideali promulgati dallo Slow Food Movement mostrano la lentezza come qualcosa di positivo, legato all’etica, a ciò che è biologico, locale e sostenibile . Ad oggi, sembra che la nozione e l'impatto della lentezza siano stati studiati in diverse aree come l'alimentazione, la medicina e l'istruzione , ma poco è stato esplorato nel campo museale. Inoltre, la stessa parola slow non è mai stata analizzata dal punto di vista linguistico. Al fine di colmare tali lacune, il presente studio si propone di esplorare i cambiamenti avvenuti nel significato della parola slow negli ultimi quarant'anni sia in chiave linguistica che culturale, ponendo particolare attenzione al discorso dei musei slow e al suo impatto sul turismo. Per analizzare i cambiamenti semantici e diacronici della parola slow in italiano e in inglese sono stati creati due corpora, uno dal quotidiano italiano La Stampa e l'altro dal quotidiano britannico The Guardian. La parola slow è stata analizzata dal 1969 al 2019 per quello che riguarda La Stampa e dal 1989 al 2019 per The Guardian. Inoltre, il significato di slow è stato studiato ed esplorato utlizzando una combinazione di metodi qualitativi e quantitativi all’interno dei domini identificati nei testi dei due quotidiani, quali criminalità, istruzione, ambiente, intrattenimento, cibo, letteratura, medicina, politica ed economia, società, sport, tecnologia, turismo e meteo. Il focus sul discorso museale è stato invece analizzato utilizzando la teoria del linguaggio valutativo (appraisal theory) adottato dai Musei Slow per la promozione dei loro eventi, concentrandosi sulle nuove connotazioni date alla lentezza.Technological progress has led people towards multi-tasking in an attempt to save time and increase productivity. However, groups of people are reacting to the frenetic rhythms imposed by technological progress attempting to slow down their activities. For example, Slow Food Movement introduced by Carlo Petrini in 1986 has launched and triggered the concept of slowness not only for food consumption, one the most important and basic activities of our life, but also for other domain of our life. Through Slow Food Movements a back to the past trend is becoming more and more frequent especially for catering and hand-made/retro chains. The concept of slowness is becoming a relevant and ethical topic that is often related to what is organic, local and sustainable. To date it appears that the notion and impact of slowness have been studied in different areas such as food, medicine and education (Honor, 2002), but little has been investigated in the field of museums. Moreover, the word slow itself has never been analyzed linguistically. In order to fill such gaps, the present study sets out to explore changes that have occurred in the meaning of the word slow over the last forty years from both a linguistic and cultural perspective with a particular focus on the discourse of slow museums and its impact on tourism. The semantic diachronic changes of the word slow in Italian and in English were explored creating two robust corpora, one from the Italian newspaper La Stampa and the other one from the British press The Guardian. The word slow was analyzed within the different newspaper domains from 1969 to 2019 for what concerns La Stampa, and from 1989 to 2019 for the Guardian. Different domains such as Crime, Education, Environment, Entertainment, Food, Literature, Medicine, Politics & Economics, Society, Sports, Technology, Tourism and Weather were identified employing a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. The focus on the discourse of slow museums was explored using appraisal theory and analyzing the language of evaluation adopted by Slow Museums to promote themselves while still focusing on the new connotations given to slowness