Viral Language

Viral Language considers a range of different types of public communication and their discussion of the Covid-19 pandemic as a way to investigate health communication. The authors introduce and apply a range of approaches informed by linguistic theory to investigate experiences of the pandemic across a variety of public contexts.

Viral Language considers a range of different types of public communication and their discussion of the Covid-19 pandemic as a way to investigate health communication. The authors introduce and apply a range of approaches informed by linguistic theory to investigate experiences of the pandemic across a variety of public contexts. In doing so, they demonstrate how experiences of health and illness can be shaped by political messaging, scientific research, news articles and advertising.

Through a series of case studies of Covid-related texts, the authors consider aspects of language instruction, information and innovation, showcasing the breadth of topics that can be studied as part of health communication. Furthermore, each case study provides practical guidance on how to carry out investigations using social media texts, how to analyse metaphor, how to track language innovation and how to work with text and images. *Viral Language* is critical reading for postgraduate and upper undergraduate students of applied linguistics and health communication.

Autorentext

Luke C. Collins is a Senior Research Associate with the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science at Lancaster University, UK.

Veronika Koller is Professor of Discourse Studies at Lancaster University, UK.

Klappentext

Viral Language considers a range of different types of public communication and their discussion of the Covid-19 pandemic as a way to investigate health communication. The authors introduce and apply a range of approaches informed by linguistic theory to investigate experiences of the pandemic across a variety of public contexts.

Inhalt

List of Figures; List of Tables; List of abbreviations; Acknowledgements; Chapter 1 Introduction; Chapter 2 Health promotion and public engagement on Twitter; Chapter 3 Politicians' use of metaphor; Chapter 4 Key features of scientific writing on Covid-19; Chapter 5 Investigating 'the science' in news discourse; Chapter 6 Language change in news on the web: lexical innovation in response to Covid-19; Chapter 7 Advertising in the time of coronavirus; Chapter 8 Concluding remarks; Index