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
