Abstract
The recent COVID-19 pandemic has triggered an enormous stream of information. Parascientific digital communication has pursued different avenues, from mainstream media news to social networking, at times combined. Likewise, citizens have developed new discourse practices, with readers as active participants who claim authority. Based on a corpus of 500 reader comments from The Guardian, we analyse how readers build their authorial voice on COVID-19 news as well as their agentive power and its implications. Methodologically, we draw upon stance markers, depersonalisation strategies, and heteroglossic markers, from the perspective of discursive interpersonality. Our findings unearth that stance markers are central for readers to build authority and produce content. Depersonalised and heteroglossic markers are also resorted, reinforcing readers’ authority with external information that mirrors expert scientific communication. Conclusions suggest a strong citizen agentive power that can either support news articles, spreading parascientific information, or challenge them, therefore, contributing to produce pseudoscientific messages.
Highlights
We hypothesise that readers may support and challenge writers on COVID-19 related matters, construing an authorial voice that defies that of journalists who write about scientific issues
Given that reader comments trigger strong interpersonal characteristics and specific content, we have considered that closeness does reinforce readers’ authority through stance markers such as first-person singular pronouns, and through attitudinals such as adjectives, verbs, etc
Distance pragmatic strategies can characterize authorial voice as well as content, as manifested in the use of hedges or inclusive first-person plural pronouns, depersonalizations and heteroglossic markers, which mirror the conventions of scientific discourse
Summary
Scientists nowadays play a variety of roles related to the skills associated with scientific work. They often act as experts [1] on issues of social relevance in the media or at events with public impact, a practice we could name as parascientific. The issuing of judgements based on their expertise in a scientific field can help to shape public opinion or to guide the behaviour of citizens [2]. In this vein, scientific communication in general has undergone important changes over the last decades. Many scientists have begun to practice what is called open science, where “research materials are provided through an “open” (online) lab notebook, data collections are made available, and some scientists even blog about the research progress” [3]
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