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- Volume 14, Issue 2, 2023
Pragmatics and Society - Volume 14, Issue 2, 2023
Volume 14, Issue 2, 2023
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Solidarity and support in Belgian residential linguistic landscapes during the Covid-19 outbreak
Author(s): Mieke Vandenbroucke and Fien De Malschepp.: 210–235 (26)More LessAbstractThis article examines the role played by signs in the public space of two socio-economically stratified residential neighbourhoods of Ghent (Belgium) during the first Covid-19 outbreak in 2020. On the basis of fieldwork, we explore the potential of public signs as a resourceful strategy for communicating solidarity and support and the discursive construction of a community affected by this crisis. We show that in times of lockdown and social distancing, the residential linguistic landscape in both neighbourhoods became strategically appropriated by local inhabitants to communicate with neighbours and strangers and was operationalised as a vehicle to serve new communicative functions such as the conveying of solidarity and support as well as gratitude, and collective belonging. Some differences related to emplacement, language use and quantity of signs were also observed. Overall, the article documents the affective appropriation of space through Covid-19 signs during the Covid-19 outbreak and periods of lockdown in Flanders, Belgium.
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Pragmatic functions of humor in Berlin’s directive Covid-19 Signs
Author(s): Rita Tamara Vallentinpp.: 236–256 (21)More LessAbstractThis paper deals with the pragmatic functions of verbal and visual humor in Covid-19 related directive signs. Within the framework of material and social semiotics, I analyze humorous directive signs from the Berlin district Friedrichshain communicating hygiene rules and proper social behavior during the re- opening phase of local businesses after the first lockdown in 2020. The interplay of multilingual, graphic and intertextual features in the signs reveals two pragmatic functions: On the one hand, they express hygienic measures; on the other hand, the signs do relational work and foster community-building aimed at both general and very specific audiences. This is done by drawing humorously on community-specific intertextuality requiring cultural literacies based on community-specific knowledge. The signs are, thus, not limited to mere instructions for action addressed to a general audience, but are designed for specific groups of addressees thereby showing the socially and spatially fragmented diversity of Berlin’s public sphere.
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“Money can buy health”
Author(s): Vincent Wai Sum Tse, Jasper Zhao Zhen Wu and Andre Joseph Thengpp.: 257–280 (24)More LessAbstractDrawing on the notion of affect, this paper offers a multimodal critical discourse analysis of health-related product advertising in Hong Kong during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Advertisements were collected in the city’s space of commute. We examine the construal of risk and protection in the advertisements and via their emplacement in three spatial-temporal dimensions observed in the data: the market society, the concrete public space, and the intimate familial space. Our analysis demonstrates that while risk and protection are linguistically and visually depicted to varying degrees across these dimensions, the emplacement of advertisements prompts the viewers to regard their immediate space as full of risks. As individuals encounter the advertisements, they become interpellated to see the purchase of the advertised products as necessary. Illuminating health communication during the pandemic, this study contributes to health commercialisation and responsibilisation research and provides insights into the ideological, interpersonal nature of affect.
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Fear appeals in Chinese public signs of COVID-19 prevention in local communities
pp.: 281–305 (25)More LessAbstractGuided by the Extended Parallel Process Model (EPPM), this paper explicates the messaging strategies in Chinese public signs of COVID-19 prevention in local communities. 162 signs were collected from Internet posts. Our results show that the EPPM is a viable fear appeal framework to explain the communication of public health risks. Most signs communicated the threat of the virus to the public, whereas fewer signs emphasized the efficacy to effectively control the threat. In addition to communicating individual threat and efficacy, quite a few signs also highlighted collective threat and efficacy. Moreover, the language used in these signs is tailored to local cultural and social conventions. These findings not only contribute to the growing body of research on the interpersonal function of public signage from a Chinese perspective, but also demonstrate the utility of combining pragmatic research with messaging strategies in health communication research.
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Finnish and French public signs from commercial premises during the Covid-19 pandemic
Author(s): Johanna Isosävipp.: 306–333 (28)More LessAbstractThis paper studies 200 signs displayed in commercial premises during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in Finland and in France. The data were collected through crowdsourcing via social media platforms and analysed from the perspective of cross-cultural pragmatics. The vast majority of Finnish and French directives were direct, but cross-cultural differences emerged in relation to perspective and mitigation. Specifically, French signs preferred an impersonal perspective, whereas Finnish signs favoured a hearer perspective, and Finnish signs were more often mitigated than French signs. The signs balanced between attracting customers and imposing safety measures on them through the justification of measures, the presentation of measures taken by businesses themselves, as well as by addressing clients and thanking them. The findings suggest that the directives in Covid-19 signs differ from directives in other data types.
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Disseminating risk communication
Author(s): Eva Ogiermann and Spyridoula Bellapp.: 334–357 (24)More LessAbstractThis paper investigates advice offered on closure signs displayed on businesses in Greece and the UK during the first lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic. By scrutinising signs photographed in London and in Athens, as well as speeches delivered by the British and Greek prime ministers at the time of the closures, our analysis shows how business owners pass on government instructions to their customers. The study thus makes an original contribution to research on the effectiveness of risk communication, revealing that while businesses in both countries supported the implementation of containment measures, the Greek signs replicated governmental messages more closely. At the same time, the analysis of advice offered by business owners to their customers in an unprecedented context of a global health crisis provides new insights into research on this speech act.
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Covid-19 WhatsApp sticker memes as public signs in Oman
Author(s): Najma Al Zidjaly and Zumurrod Al Barhipp.: 358–381 (24)More LessAbstractIn this article, we identify a new form of public discourse that takes the shape of WhatsApp sticker memes personally created and nationally shared on WhatsApp by citizens in Oman during the Covid-19 pandemic to concomitantly act as carriers of information and as promoters of relational work. The data consist of 67 public sign stickers culled from a larger set amassed as part of an ethnographic project on Arabs and Covid-19. Drawing upon interpersonal pragmatics and visual semiotics, we examine the interplay of textual and visual modes in featured stickers, demonstrating how Omanis translated official Covid-19 instructions into three types of terse memes to facilitate communal distribution. We suggest that to encourage public cooperation, the stickers struck a culturally-imperative balance between keeping traditional norms intact while committing socially offensive acts. The article contributes to research on digital discourse by exploring sticker use as public signs in the understudied Arabic context.
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