Abstract
Released during the COVID-19 pandemic, Viral Discourse aims to show how different approaches to discourse analysis contribute to understanding meaning and action and formulating real-world solutions ‘to respond to this crisis and future crises’ (p. 2). The first of 10 chapters introduces these aims by contextualizing the conviction that ‘words have power and need to be handled with care’ (p. 1). The chapter explores when and how ‘every action is meaningful and made possible by meaning (or discourse)’ (p. 2) and emphasizes the noticing of particular discursive resources like signs, slogans, metaphors, videos, memes or hashtags ‘at the point of where meaning is created’ (p. 3). The rest of the volume addresses these issues from different perspectives.
In Chapter 2, Jones attempts to interpret the debates stirred by face masks throughout the pandemic, focusing on the social semiotics of face masks as ‘things that conceal, that protect and that transform’ (p. 7) during which some cracks like those in our healthcare and economic systems are also revealed. The analysis shows that understanding the heavy meanings of the key items in this pandemic could reduce communication obstacles. Chapter 3, by Hafner, uses genre analysis to analyse the discursive patterns in evidence given by scientific and medical experts to support their arguments in opinion articles on face masks in The Guardian. Hafner notes that, contrary to what we take for granted, ideological considerations instead of scientific reasoning have been the major concerns in constructing professional identities. Integrating concepts from multimodality and translanguaging, in Chapter 4 Ho analyses a YouTube video created by an American former teacher in China. The video creator uses translanguaging and multimodal resources to take his cultural positioning as ‘prepared others’ in the West with face masks on. Such communicative practices in this pandemic reinforce the stereotypes of East and West cultural differences.
To understand public responses to the pandemic, Chapter 5 by Jaworska uses a a comparative corpus-assisted approach to uncover how national media, which are ‘the prime source of health information’ (p. 26), choose words to represent the virus. Results suggest that war metaphors are salient in the UK and the USA, but are relatively absent in Germany, due to different national pandemic experiences and historical contexts, such as sensitivities left by the Nazi past. In Chapter 6, Zhu Hua contributes to the studies of urban public signs in the time of crisis. The discussion suggests that the lack of multilingual signs ‘reflects a wider picture of multilingualism in crisis’ (p. 48): linguistic perception barriers may cause higher death toll among ethnic communities in the UK.
The pandemic lockdowns and quarantines have brought increases in digital communication. In Chapter 7, Aslan draws on principles of multimodal digital discourse analysis to study internet memes about coronavirus, whose humour is not employed only for coping with tragedy and uncertainty under COVID, but also for engaging with people’s perceptions and experiences of the pandemic. He demonstrates that COVID-19 memes can ‘shed light on social structures and related ideologies and discourses’ (p. 60). The investigation provides many interesting examples and demystifies the mechanisms of memetic humour, such as intertextuality, wordplay and incongruity of elements.
Chapter 8, by Lee, notices the sharp rise of COVID-19 hate on Twitter. She sees COVID as an entry point to understand ‘how the idea of hate speech is discursively constructed’ (p. 62). The analysis shows that critical discourse analysis can ‘uncover the discourse strategies (e.g. attributing to origin, shared knowledge, authorization) of the online abuse’. In Chapter 9, which builds on mediated discourse analysis, Jones contends that the semiotic resources used by the government on the British Prime Minister’s briefing podium, the UK COVID-Alert System, are functionally ‘a kind of scaffolding to stage the government’s performance of competence’ (p. 77). However, the vague advice they provide in the illusion of precision could lead the public to take unnecessary risks.
The final chapter is slightly different from previous ones. Inspired by public and live conversations and by citizen sociolinguistics, Adami reports on the ongoing cooperative research project PanMeMic (Pandemic Meaning Making of Interaction and Communication), meant as a transmedia space for everybody beyond academia to reflect on pandemic changes in interaction and communication.
Chapters in this volume give an in-depth analysis of how cultural, societal and political cracks during the COVID-19 pandemic can be detected by noticing ‘trivial’ linguistic phenomena, and ultimately help us understand how to ‘socially and linguistically manage the ambiguity and uncertainty’ (p. 4). The volume inspires the readers on how the transdisciplinary methods available to discourse analysts can contribute to formulating real-world solutions to the problem. The thought-provoking research keeps it alive, leaving both writers and readers potential space for further development. This is particularly important because, although each of the 10 pieces in this volume focuses on a different approach to analyse viral discourse amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, there is no attempt to integrate these into a cohesive theoretical framework to interpret discourses around the COVID-19 pandemic.
Nonetheless, Viral Discourse offers insights into how semiotic knowledge is co-constructed while practices are emerging, although it is ‘still in its infancy and has so far developed on an entirely voluntary and spontaneous basis’ (p. 86). The volume will be methodologically and theoretically useful for researchers in various disciplines, such as sociology, media studies, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and sociolinguistics.