Love Robbie, Darics Erika, Palmieri Rudi
Department of English, Languages and Applied Linguistics, Aston University, Birmingham, UK.
Communication and Information Studies, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands.
Appl Corpus Linguistics. 2023 Dec;3(3):100060. doi: 10.1016/j.acorp.2023.100060. Epub 2023 Jun 17.
Communication has played a critical role during the initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and communicators have had a particularly difficult task in persuading different types of audience to comply with ever-changing regulations. Local government organisations play a crucial role in recontextualising the national messaging for a local audience and encouraging the public to comply with regulations. This paper investigates local government organisations' (henceforth LGOs) engagement strategies in COVID-related posts on social media. In collaboration with LGOs in England, we examined their communication strategies on Twitter and Facebook during the second UK national lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic in November-December 2020. Using methods from corpus-assisted discourse studies, the paper analyses the occurrence and functions of selected interactive engagement markers, in this case personal pronouns, questions and hashtags. We find that such linguistic features function to encourage engagement by (a) helping to foster relatedness through ambiguity; (b) creating autonomy-supporting communication; and (c) making messages 'stand out'. Based on our corpus analysis, we discuss the initial response of the participating councils to our findings and outline future directions including the integration of multimodal approaches to studying the role of localised social media in national crisis management. We argue for more attention to be paid to the many local communicators who play an invaluable role in encouraging the public to comply with national measures in times of crisis.
在对新冠疫情的初期应对中，沟通发挥了关键作用，而沟通者在说服不同类型的受众遵守不断变化的规定方面面临着特别艰巨的任务。地方政府组织在将国家信息重新解读以适用于当地受众并鼓励公众遵守规定方面发挥着至关重要的作用。本文研究地方政府组织（以下简称LGOs）在社交媒体上发布的与新冠疫情相关帖子中的参与策略。我们与英国的地方政府组织合作，研究了它们在2020年11月至12月英国第二次全国新冠疫情封锁期间在推特和脸书上的沟通策略。本文运用语料库辅助话语研究方法，分析了选定的互动参与标记（在本文中为个人代词、问题和主题标签）的出现情况及功能。我们发现，这些语言特征通过以下方式促进参与：（a）通过模糊性帮助建立关联；（b）创造支持自主性的沟通；（c）使信息“脱颖而出”。基于我们的语料库分析，我们讨论了参与研究的议会对我们研究结果的初步反应，并概述了未来的方向，包括整合多模态方法来研究本地化社交媒体在国家危机管理中的作用。我们主张更多地关注众多地方沟通者，他们在危机时期鼓励公众遵守国家措施方面发挥着不可估量的作用。
