Abstract
Focusing on media discourse and adopting a Critical Discourse Analysis—linguistic and rhetorical—perspective, this paper explores the role of the media in influencing citizens’ behaviour towards the COVID-19 crisis. The paper evaluates the set of potentially persuasive lexical items and emotional implicatures used by two quality newspapers, i.e. The Guardian (UK edition) and El País (Spain edition), to report on the pandemic during the three waves—the periods between the onset and trough of virus contamination—that occurred until March 2021. A representative, ad-hoc, comparable corpus (COVIDWave_EN and COVIDWave_ES) was compiled in English and Spanish comprising the news on the pandemic that appeared in the aforementioned newspapers during the three established time periods. The corpora were uploaded to Sketch Engine, which was used to first detect and analyse different categories (nouns, verbs, and adjectives) of word frequency, and then assign negative or positive polarity. Lexical keyness was secondly analysed to categorize emotional implicatures of control, metaphors, signals of epistemic asymmetry and positive implicatures in order to discern how they become weapons of negative or positive persuasion. The ultimate end of the study was to critically analyse and contrast the lexicon and rhetoric used by these two newspapers during this time period so as to unveil the stance taken by governments and health institutions—voices of authority—to disseminate words of control and persuasion with the aim of exerting influence on the behaviour of citizens in UK and Spain.
Highlights
The study here presented constitutes a contrastive lexical and rhetorical analysis of a corpus of news items collected around the COVID 19 pandemic from two examples of the so-called quality press in the United Kingdom and in Spain: The British The Guardian and the Spanish newspaper El País, during the months of March 2020 to March 2021
A representative, ad-hoc, and comparable corpus has been compiled in English (COVIDWave_EN) and Spanish (COVIDWave_ES) comprising the news on the pandemic that appeared in two quality newspapers, i.e. The Guardian (UK edition) and El País (Spain edition) during the three time periods according to the COVID19 data by John Hopkins University 4, as shown in the table: Three sub-corpora have been subsequently built representing the time interval for each wave in the respective country and word lists have been generated from the whole corpora
This is a quantitative method that involves comparing the frequency lists of two corpora; one being bigger and more general, usually called “reference corpus” (RC), and the other being smaller or more specialized, known as the “target corpus” (TC)
Summary
The study here presented constitutes a contrastive lexical and rhetorical analysis of a corpus of news items collected around the COVID 19 pandemic from two examples of the so-called quality press in the United Kingdom and in Spain: The British The Guardian and the Spanish newspaper El País, during the months of March 2020 to March 2021 This is, a diachronic study, since it deals with the language of control and persuasion used during the course of the different outbreaks of the disease and their impact on society, which have been described as the first, second and third ‘waves’ of the infectious process. The media is seldom unbiased, leaning towards a specific viewpoint that might support or oppose government policy, in tune with the ideology of their readers or their own editorial line; the dependency between prestige media and official sources must necessarily be enhanced in a natural disaster such as a pandemic [3: p.1–2], a context of crisis like few others, in the course of which institutions must propagate and implement forceful and urgent patterns of action so that the climate of uncertainty does not prolong the crisis over time, or increase the level of insecurity
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