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Lingue Culture Mediazioni - Languages Cultures Mediation
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  This is an Open Access Journal Open Access journal
ISSN (Print) 2284-1881 - ISSN (Online) 2421-0293
Published by LED Edizioni Universitarie Homepage  [5 journals]
  • Editorial. Understanding COVID-19 Communication: Linguistic and Discursive
           Perspectives

    • Authors: Maria Cristina Paganoni, Joanna Osiejewicz
      Pages: 5 - 18
      Abstract: This collaborative essay addresses COVID-19 communication, focussing on the linguistic strategies and discursive constructions that were adopted, first to cope with the unprecedented crisis scenarios of the pandemic and later to hail the post-pandemic times. It recapitulates the unfolding of COVID-19 communication from 2020 to 2022, espousing a linguistic and discursive perspective. To that purpose, it elaborates on a few keywords and key phrases that consistently identify the different pandemic and post-pandemic phases in the public domain. i.e. ‘recovery and resilience’, ‘smart’ and ‘virtual’, and the ‘new normal’, to finish with a few reflections on the challenges of legal communication faced with mounting social intolerance and the exacerbation of hate speech and xenophobia. The overview privileges the European Union and the UK, the latter launching the first mass vaccination campaign in December 2020, although with the awareness of the global nature of the phenomenon and its present repercussions. The aim of the essay is to frame the nine research articles in this issue as attempts to interpret an exceptionally difficult time span and as a form of intellectual resilience.
      PubDate: 2023-01-26
      DOI: 10.7358/lcm-2022-002-edit
      Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 2 (2023)
       
  • Radio Advertising in Italy at the Time of the Pandemic

    • Authors: Giuseppe Sergio
      Pages: 19 - 39
      Abstract: The article focuses on a specific form of advertising – radio advertising – at a time when it was called upon to change itself, namely during the first phase of the Coronavirus pandemic. Taking into consideration a corpus of radio advertisements broadcast during the programme La Zanzara, on air on Radio24, the main rhetorical, morpho-syntactic and lexical aspects are considered. The linguistic profile that emerges is not particularly lively, nor do the adverts show that they have fully adapted to the pandemic.
      PubDate: 2023-01-26
      DOI: 10.7358/lcm-2022-002-gser
      Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 2 (2023)
       
  • Making Sense of the Response to COVID-19 in Higher Education. A Case Study
           of Crisis Communication in Two Universities

    • Authors: Giuseppe Palumbo, Ann Hill Duin
      Pages: 41 - 60
      Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic brought extreme challenges and disruption to higher education, resulting in hurried adoption of online teaching. From the point of view of crisis communication, the COVID-19 pandemic as experienced in HE institutions represents an interesting case, because crisis management and communication were primarily, if not exclusively, directed at internal stakeholders (essentially, students and staff ). We present a case study that compares and contrasts the COVID-related responses of two different universities: the University of Minnesota, in the U.S., and the University of Trieste, in Italy. In particular, we look at the sets of documents issued by the leadership of these universities over a period of 23 months between February 2020 (the start of the health crisis) and December 2021. The analysis of the documents revealed that unexpected spaces of freedom empowered instructors. We identify four discursive traits associated with these spaces: definitional change, code glossing, and the use of engagement markers and permissives. However, this empowerment changed over time, as universities became eager to go back to “normal” and reinstate restrictions from pre-pandemic times.
      PubDate: 2023-01-26
      DOI: 10.7358/lcm-2022-002-gpad
      Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 2 (2023)
       
  • COVID-19-Related FAQs as a Form of Online Institutional Communication. An
           Exploratory Study

    • Authors: Katia Peruzzo
      Pages: 61 - 80
      Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has affected everyone’s life, and COVID-19 prevention and control measures have altered everyone’s daily routine. Such measures have been put in place through legislative and regulatory acts, whose typical linguistic features make them not always accessible to the population they apply to. Therefore, other forms of communication have been used as a form of mediation, for instance by institutions and news media outlets, to share information on and thus facilitate the implementation of such measures among the population. This paper presents an exploratory micro-analysis of an English and an Italian webpage containing frequently asked questions (FAQs), a web genre often used for knowledge dissemination but still scarcely investigated from a linguistic perspective. The aim of the FAQs examined is to explain the provisions adopted to tackle the second wave of the pandemic (the two webpages were available online in September 2020) to a non-specialised and non-better specified audience. After briefly discussing the content distribution, the study adopts a conversation analysis perspective to identify the type of questions used and the (lack of ) question-conditioned relevance in adjacency pairs.
      PubDate: 2023-01-26
      DOI: 10.7358/lcm-2022-002-kper
      Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 2 (2023)
       
  • COVID-19 Explained to Children in Italy. A Comparison between
           Institutional Guidelines and Narratives

    • Authors: Michela Dota
      Pages: 81 - 99
      Abstract: Among the indirect consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on the mental health of children and adolescents, most studies, both nationally and internationally, have found an increase in anxious-depressive symptoms, sometimes associated with suicide attempts. Institutions and public health professionals therefore developed textual documents and multimedia products to provide guidelines to set up, among other things, a narrative of the event capable of responding to the psycho-physical distress of children and adolescents and ultimately reducing symptoms. At the same time, individual educators, writers, and YouTubers offered alternative products (accessed through the web) to respond to the same needs. This paper intends to analyse and compare the narrative suggested and packaged by both types of producers mentioned to detect the linguistic-textual and pragmatic choices and their effect.
      PubDate: 2023-01-26
      DOI: 10.7358/lcm-2022-002-mdot
      Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 2 (2023)
       
  • COVID-19-Related Cases before the European Court of Human Rights. A
           Multiperspective Approach

    • Authors: Jekaterina Nikitina
      Pages: 101 - 122
      Abstract: This study overviews how the COVID-19 pandemic is framed in five cases before the European Court of Human Rights (the ECtHR). By reconstructing the heteroglossic system of genres at the ECtHR, the study contributes to the limited literature on the Court’s discursive practices and genres. The analysis looks into the framing of the COVID-19 pandemic as a human rights violation and identifies preferred interpretation schemata across the participation framework of the cases considered using critical discourse analysis and framing. The findings identify a scaffolding of dialogical frames, where most applicants advanced politicized frame systems built on the core denial of the existence or seriousness of COVID-19, framing the governments’ actions or omissions as civil and political human rights violations. The Governments built on the general healthcare crisis framing, and counterframed societal limitations as agency stemming from a “health and safety first” frame. The Court refuted most of the politicized framing choices and accepted most healthcare-related frames, operating under the “exceptional and unforeseen circumstances” frame.
      PubDate: 2023-01-26
      DOI: 10.7358/lcm-2022-002-jnik
      Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 2 (2023)
       
  • Linguistic and Communicative Practices in the US Military’s Response
           to the COVID-19 Emergency

    • Authors: Roxanne Barbara Doerr
      Pages: 123 - 144
      Abstract: There has been debate on the language used by the media and the government in communicating about the pandemic emergency (Kranert et al. 2020; Cardinale 2021; Kalkman 2021). One of the main criticisms lies in their extensive use of “military metaphors”, a common trend in healthcare discourse (Nie et al. 2016; Parsi 2016). In truth, the US military avoids such aggressive language in favor of a more positive professional discursive approach (Parcell and Webb 2015), with greater focus on the support and implementation of clear, structured pandemic emergency plans. As a result, the military has managed to maintain its activity and a relatively low fatality rate while becoming a model of containment in certain areas (Nevitt 2020). The study will adopt the CADS (Corpus Assisted Discourse Analysis) methodology to analyze a corpus of military press articles and Department of Defense resources. It will draw qualitative insights on productive discourse patterns of military and governmental authorities, while empirically confirming or questioning such insights. In doing so, the study aims at highlighting alternative linguistic strategies that may be productively used in civilian emergency communication.
      PubDate: 2023-01-26
      DOI: 10.7358/lcm-2022-002-rdoe
      Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 2 (2023)
       
  • Terminology for Medical Journalism. Terminological Resources, Neology, and
           the COVID-19 Syndemic

    • Authors: Anna Anselmo
      Pages: 145 - 168
      Abstract: This article aims to investigate the terminological needs of journalists reporting medical news in the context of the current COVID-19 syndemic. It presents the work context – medical journalism – and the professional group selected – dubbed ‘occasional medical journalists’, a subset of medical journalists – and analyses their terminological needs. It further offers a critical description of a selection of terminological and terminographic resources currently available to the professional category at hand, highlighting room for improvement. Lastly, it briefly explores the interdependence between the professional group, the syndemic, and neology, and provides a sample ad hoc terminological entry conceived to facilitate the correct use of Coronavirus-related terminology in the press.
      PubDate: 2023-01-26
      DOI: 10.7358/lcm-2022-002-aans
      Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 2 (2023)
       
  • Occupational Health and Safety during COVID-19. A Cross-National
           Comparison of Discursive and Communication Practices in Italy and the US

    • Authors: Pietro Manzella
      Pages: 169 - 182
      Abstract: This paper examines legal communication in Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) discourse and investigates the rhetorical strategies implemented at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. To this end, the paper focuses on a dataset of legal provisions introduced as emergency legislation – measures adopted to tackle unprecedented circumstances – in Italy and the US, in order to identify commonalities and differences when informing the general public of the measures laid down particularly to protect workers in the workplace. This paper is intended to contribute to research in discourse analysis in OHS, an area of expertise which has been given fresh momentum since the onset of the pandemic. The decision to examine Italian and US emergency legislation was made in consideration of the cultural and legal differences between the two countries, which give rise to a number of discursive approaches to emergency management.
      PubDate: 2023-01-26
      DOI: 10.7358/lcm-2022-002-pman
      Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 2 (2023)
       
  • Comunicare e gestire la crisi da COVID-19 in Italia e Giappone.
           Prospettive dall’analisi critica del discorso e dalla comunicazione di
           crisi

    • Authors: Gianmarco Fiorentini
      Pages: 183 - 200
      Abstract: The use of rhetorical strategies and other linguistic devices in the context of institutional communication on COVID-19 has been the subject of attention by linguists and commentators worldwide. This study discusses the opportunity to integrate critical discourse analysis (CDA) with tools offered by crisis communication theory. In order to highlight the critical role of language in managing the crisis, this study presents a comparison between Italian and Japanese texts considered of primary importance for the initial phase of the COVID-19 crisis in the two countries. Although these countries adopted different approaches to deal with the emergency, the analysis shows that both Prime Ministers used similar linguistic devices in order to communicate and manage the crisis, which enabled them to reach their respective public governance goals.
      PubDate: 2023-01-26
      DOI: 10.7358/lcm-2022-002-gfio
      Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 2 (2023)
       
  • Authors

    • Authors: AA. VV.
      Pages: 201 - 204
      PubDate: 2023-01-26
      Issue No: Vol. 9, No. 2 (2023)
       
 
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