The British Queen’s address on the pandemic: news coverage

Abstract

The aim of the research is to single out ways of representing the contents of Queen Elizabeth II’s address in concern with the pandemic of coronavirus COVID-19 in two news texts: international, published on the site www.bbc.com, and national, given at www.mirror.co.uk. The comparison of the monarch’s address with the corresponding news texts is carried out in two aspects: the rhetoric of text composing and the usage of constructions to highlight the ideas of the Queen. At the dispositional level, i.e. text composing, the news text of the international issue dwells on five topics from the six ones in the address, while the article on the national site contains only two topics. The differences in organizing the compositional bloc of the short message reveals the fact that the international issue represents the main purpose of the speech to reassure the citizens that they will survive the virus, whereas the national issue indicates the moving effect of the speech on the addressee and the wish of the monarch to overcome the pandemic. The main part of the article on www.bbc.com contains the introductory bloc, which reflects Queen’s gratitude to the British and key workers, and ten paragraphs, which present the words of support she gave, describe the evacuation of children during the WWII, give praise to the citizens and honor them. The constructional level of speech representation rests on identical and modified pairings. In the international news text, there are identical micro- and macroconstructions, while modified pairings undergo the operations of syntactical transformation, mono- and multigeneralization, and specification. The main part of the news text on www.mirror.co.uk informs about the Queen’s pride for her citizens and gratitude to key workers. From the rhetorical point of view, the article includes theses and arguments, represented respectively by generalized modified pairings and macroconstructions comprising from two to four sentences of Queen’s direct quotes. The contrast in topic choice and the selection of construction types is caused by different target audience of both issues.