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Viral Language

Analysing the Covid-19 Pandemic in Public Discourse

Veronika Koller author Luke C Collins author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd

Published:29th Sep '23

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Viral Language cover

This insightful book examines public communication during the pandemic, revealing how language shapes health narratives and influences societal perceptions. Viral Language is a must-read for students in related fields.

The book Viral Language explores various forms of public communication in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, focusing on health communication. The authors utilize diverse approaches grounded in linguistic theory to analyze how the pandemic has influenced experiences across different public spheres. By examining the interplay between language and public discourse, they highlight the significant role that political messaging, scientific findings, news articles, and advertising play in shaping perceptions of health and illness.

In Viral Language, the authors present a series of case studies that delve into Covid-related texts, offering insights into language instruction, information dissemination, and innovation. These case studies not only illustrate the wide array of topics relevant to health communication but also provide practical guidance for conducting investigations using social media texts. Readers will learn how to analyze metaphor, track language innovation, and effectively work with both text and images in their research.

This book serves as an essential resource for postgraduate and upper undergraduate students specializing in applied linguistics and health communication. By bridging theory and practice, Viral Language encourages a deeper understanding of how language influences public health narratives and the ways in which communication can be strategically employed in times of crisis.

A clearly written, must-read piece of work for anybody interested in how a pandemic not only affected our lives but also our own language. An invaluable resource to discover the power of metaphor in unveiling human thinking and creativity in different types of public discourse (health, political, and informational) and contexts (social media, advertising).

Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano, The University of Zaragoza, Spain

With their book, Collins and Koller fill an important gap in the vast literature about Covid-19. They provide readers with an original, critically thorough, and yet accessible, inquiry into the way language has been used in communicating the pandemic, highlighting the impact it generally has in the perception of science in society.

Massimiliano Demata, University of Turin, Italy

COVID-19 has prompted much scholarship in the fields of linguistics and discourse analysis. But Viral Language is unique in that the authors use multiple points of entry to investigate the way the pandemic is represented in various types of public discourses. This book not only provides a thorough appraisal of COVID-19 as discursive construct and social experience, but also initiates the reader into numerous types of linguistic analysis, from speech acts, transitivity and multimodality, to metaphor and lexical innovation. A very valuable book for scholars and students.

Fiona Rossette-Crake, Paris Nanterre University, France

ISBN: 9780367756680

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 548g

198 pages