***UNCHECKED*** 31.3025, Calls: Disc Analysis/Switzerland

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-31-3025. Tue Oct 06 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 31.3025, Calls: Disc Analysis/Switzerland

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Date: Tue, 06 Oct 2020 19:40:36
From: Daniel Weiss [dawe at slav.uzh.ch]
Subject: Remedies against the pandemic: How politicians communicate their crisis management

 
Full Title: Remedies against the pandemic: How politicians communicate their crisis management 

Date: 27-Jun-2021 - 02-Jul-2021
Location: Winterthur, Switzerland 
Contact Person: Daniel Weiss
Meeting Email: dawe at slav.uzh.ch

Linguistic Field(s): Discourse Analysis 

Call Deadline: 20-Oct-2020 

Meeting Description:

Panel Organizers: 
Daniel Weiss, University of Zurich
Andreas Musolff, University of East Anglia

The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic offers a multifarious picture of political
reactions across different nations: they range from recognizing the full
extent of the existential threat to simply ignoring any danger. Consequently,
the measures propagated reach from very restrictive to none, and the range of
communicative strategies involved is extremely wide. Given the unprecedented
challenge posed by the medical crisis, which by far exceeds previous diseases
(for AIDS see Goldstein 2004), and its presumably disastrous impact on the
(inter)national economy, this does not come as a surprise: policy makers
cannot draw on ready-made tools and procedures tested on former occasions to
cope with similar crises, nor are there any reliable scripts available how to
gain the support of the broad public for their decisions. The panel seeks to
shed some light on the interaction of those parameters that are most likely to
have an impact on the different strategies and how they are communicated: the
political style of the leaders (liberal vs. authoritarian), their general
orientation (right wing vs. centrist/left wing), and the degree of
affectedness of their countries (heavy – light).
In view of these extraordinarily wide objectives, the organizers welcome the
following approaches: neo-Gricean or Relevance theory based pragmatics,
applications of cognitive metaphor theory (Semion, Demjen et al. 2018),
Proximization theory (Cap 2013), corpus linguistics, argumentation theory (van
Eemeren, Garssen et al. 2014, Wodak 2011) and computer-mediated communication
studies.


Second Call for Papers: 

The ongoing pandemic offers a multifarious picture of reactions across
different nations. The following parameters seem to have an impact on the
strategies and how they are communicated: the political style of the leaders
(liberal vs. authoritarian), their general orientation (right wing vs.
centrist/left wing), the degree of affectedness of their countries (heavy –
light). The measures propagated reach from very restrictive to none, and they
involve a range of communicative strategies. Analyses may include the
following perspectives:
 - Do the leaders recognize or deny the threat? What stances towards the
pandemic do they take: ignoring, ridiculing, belittling, taking serious,
boosting the threat? How do they refer to the disease (just another flu, an
unknown type of pneumonia, a lethal threat, a psychosis)? 
 - What authorities do they align/disalign with (scientific experts, WHO,
other countries, folk medicine, religion)? 
 - What are their overall verbal strategies when addressing the broad public:
calming, comforting, warning, encouraging, demanding, boasting with own
achievements, denouncing failures? What typical speech acts (notably
performatives) do state leaders utter? What reactions does all this trigger on
social platforms, e.g. Reddit?
 - What type of epistemic predicates expressing (un)certainty prevails? What
nonverbal or prosodic cues mark the oral delivery? 
 - How do government and opposition shape the debate in and outside
parliament? 
 - How do leaders publicly articulate conflicts with other political instances
such as the health minister or regional authorities (governors, mayors)? 
 - How do they show social empathy and/or personal involvement based on own
experience (e.g. B. Johnson, N. Peshkov, М. Mishustin)? 
 - What role do populist language and/or xenophobic attacks play when
legitimizing the own strategy? 
 - What purpose are implicit strategies intended to serve (presuppositions,
particularized implicatures, irony, metaphors and metonymies, similes,
quotations)? Who uses aggressive or relief humor? 
 - How do leaders cope with the interference of other key issues on the
current political agenda, and what argumentative weight is assigned to the
presumptive economic impact of the planned/realized measures? 

It goes without saying that most of these parameters vary in time depending on
the development of the pandemic in the given country. Moreover, the same
politician may employ different styles in the “old” media and in social media
when discussing the same subjects. The panel involves the following
disciplines: neo-Gricean or Relevance theory based pragmatics, cognitive
metaphor theory, proximization theory, corpus linguistics, multimodality
studies, argumentation theory, computer-mediated communication studies.

The organizers especially invite contrastive studies, e.g. on speeches by the
same politician before and after the outbreak of the pandemic, authoritarian
vs. “liberal” approaches to the crisis, government’s and opposition’s stances
towards the confinement strategies, divergent policies of different nations
comparable in other respects, different concepts of leadership, the relative
weight of health care and economy in argumentation, etc.

If you are interested in presenting a paper in this panel, please send your
abstract (min. 350 and max. 500 words) to: dawe at slav.uzh.ch &
a.musolff at uea.ac.uk.

All abstracts will also have to be submitted individually through the IPrA
website (https://ipra2021.exordo.com/) by 25 October 2020. Please prepare your
abstracts for submission with a reference to the IPrA Call for papers &
Submission guidelines https://pragmatics.international/page/CfP and make sure
to select ''Remedies against the pandemic: How politicians communicate their
crisis management'' as the panel for your submission.




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LINGUIST List: Vol-31-3025	
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