Unhealthy Language Linguistic Investigations Of Covid 19 Discourse

Unhealthy Language: Linguistic Investigations of Covid-19 Discourse

The proposed volume reflects on the Coronavirus pandemic as a still evolving phenomenon and captures critically its socially constructed dimension. The papers by well-established international contributors deal with a variety of themes that range from the different discourses of the first and second lockdown; the comparative responses to Covid in different parts of the world, in light of the relationship between language and culture; and the reflection of who the actors are, who talk and are talked about, in relation to the pandemic. This last theme, in particular, offers a wide variety of responses, from politicians’ and health experts’ communiqués to the voices of marginal individuals and groups like the refugees. The overall questions the papers as a whole try to answer is whether the discourses of and around Covid are equalizing or inciting inequality, whether they perpetuate existing structures of dominance and exclusion and if and how they contributed to language change. The volume offers an opportunity to both discourse analysts and sociolinguists to cross paths and work together. The variety of analytic approaches adopted in both linguistic fields, from corpus-assisted and computational approaches, to survey and interview-based studies, guarantees a ground-breaking interdisciplinary volume, with contributions designed to include linguistic analysis at all levels including the plane of grammatical description, lexis, phonology and discourse analysis.

The Cultural Pragmatics of Danger

This book addresses the problems and challenges of studying the discourse of "danger" cross-linguistically and cross-culturally, and proposes the cultural pragmatics of danger as a new field of inquiry. Detailed case studies of several linguacultures include Arabic, Chinese, Danish, English, German, Japanese and Spanish. Focusing on global and local contexts surrounding “living in dangerous times”, this book showcases how the new model of cultural pragmatics can be used to illuminate cultural meanings in discourse. Unlike the universalist approaches to pragmatics, cultural pragmatics focuses on understanding the linguacultural logics of discourse, and in the case of “danger”, the multiple cultural logics around which the themes and domains of “danger” revolve. The approach makes use of natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) as its principal analytical tool, and concepts such as “cultural keywords” and “cultural scripts” figure prominently as bearers of culture-specific meanings. The book will be of interest to students of pragmatics and discourse studies, researchers in cultural and cognitive semantics, anthropological linguistics, global humanities, political rhetoric and environmental studies, as well as linguists working in applied areas, such as risk and disaster studies, crisis and emergency communication.

Mathematical Modeling for Computer Applications