From Uncertainty to Confidence and Trust (UnConTrust)

On uncertainty, confidence, and trust in journalistic and academic writing: Concepts and examples

This general survey re-analyses the key concepts of our times and of our successive cooperation projects: crisis (2017), honesty (2018), truths (2019), uncertainty, confidence, trust (2020) and chaos, order (?2021) and follows their development of the international discourse over the last few years. It defines uncertainty, confidence, and trust from linguistic and from philosophical perspectives so that the project shares a common conceptual frame and reference.

The basic argumentation is: In "corona times", growing uncertainty may lead to less trust, but if you see uncertainty positively as a normal challenge and risk awareness, this can give confidence in your own strengths (and awareness of limitations!) and this makes cooperation and trust possible and even vital. Awareness of uncertainty is good in science, only politicians think they cannot live with it.

Keywords: key concepts, uncertainty, confidence, trust, scientific writing, journalistic writing

Sociocognitive discourse markers of suffering during the Corona crisis: Can we trust the news?

Based on Van Dijk’s theory of Sociocognitive Discourse Studies and Chouliaraki’s theory on the Mediation of Suffering, this research is aimed at identifying sociocognitive discourse markers which have been employed with the specific intention to attract readers’ attention and sell the story no matter what. Even when the news are to orientate a Western spectator towards the suffering of ‘Others’ who belong to the same category of the economically and politically strong world, the news resort to sociocognitive discourse markers with the aim to attract readership rather than boost confidence and trust. The obvious outcome is that the suffering thus presented in the news causes even more uncertainty among the readers. The corpus compiled for this research consists of news representations of the Corona crisis in 2019/2020 in the Canadian daily paper The Globe and Mail. By identifying sociocognitive discourse markers that clearly reflect a mediated representation of distant suffering, this research will demonstrate that news agencies will try to overcome the “out-of-sight-out-of-mind” phenomenon even in cases when economic and political power relations are equal. In other words, news agencies will resort to whatever resource possible, even violate the core principles of journalism just to sell their story.

Keywords: Suffering, sociocognitive discourse markers, uncertainty, trust, Corona crisis.

Uncertainty in science vs. certainty in politics: Contrasting axioms in Corona texts

This discussion highlights the completely different “professional expectations” that lead to interesting misunderstandings and controversies in the national discourse on “Corona” in Germany in early 2020. Whereas “real, good scientists” are expected to indicate uncertainty, i.e. to mark the limits of their professional knowledge, “real, good politicians” are expected to avoid uncertainty, i.e. to come across as a determined leader who knows what to do. This leads to the perception that scientists come across as “changing the goal posts” (“you can never agree on figures” or “just give us the right parameters to follow”) and politicians come across as “undercomplex” (“simple minds who always want simple answers”). In talk shows on German TV, for instance, the change of indicators (days of doubling infection rates – ratio of infections to population – case numbers) was taken as confusing by politicians and as necessary adaptation to pandemic developments by scientists. But some scientific pre-publications were also criticized. This contribution looks critically at argumentative patterns and linguistic markers. It thus tries to make a contribution to the general understanding of science in corona times and beyond.

This analysis discusses uncertainty markers in four different genres on the same topic, “Heinsberg-Study” on mortality rates in April 2020: the research article as first publication draft, an accompanying “press briefing”, a following newspaper report and hundreds of public comments underneath.

It also analyses critically the German public debate on the “Drosten study” on the virus load in school children, which was important in the “opening debate” in Germany in May 2020.

The national discourses in Germany show that although scientists are still accredited with high credibility, the procedures of scientific enquiry are difficult to understand at least for some politicians and contributors to traditional and digital media.

Keywords: scientific writing, journalistic writing, public discourse, (un)certainty, trust

Trust in police and national institutions in the US? A critical discourse analysis of ‘I can’t breathe’

This paper addresses the changing discourse of ‘I can’t breathe’, a phrase which has become shorthand for claims of police brutality and a lack of trust in the very institutions meant to provide safety and protection to all Americans. In this pilot study, I use critical discourse analysis to examine the official responses of President Trump, former Vice President Biden and former President Obama to George Floyd’s death in May 2020 and the widespread protests which followed. Drawing on Reisigl & Wodak’s (2009) discourse-historical approach, I examine discursive strategies and the ways in which these politicians use language to address the concerns of the American people. Reflecting the existing tension between colorblindness and post-racial ideologies in the United States on the one hand and a clear acknowledgement of systemic racism in the US on the other, the analysis shows how the context of the global pandemic affected the relevance and urgency of the statement ‘I can’t breathe’. Furthermore, it illustrates that potential politicians have to set the agenda for policies leading either to a challenge or a continuation of the status quo, in turn influencing trust in police and national institutions for years to come.

Keywords: Black Lives Matter, protest, George Floyd, critical discourse analysis, ‘I can’t breathe’

Conspiracy theories on Twitter in the wake of the US presidential election 2020

The present paper deals with the phenomenon of conspiracy theories that has gained quite some interest among researchers in the past couple of years (Douglas et al. 2019, Gray 2008, Keeley 1999, Uscinski 2018). The interesting question is, why do people engage in conspiracist thinking and spread these, sometimes very obviously wrong, claims? For this paper, I selected one of the most polarizing figures in politics – Donald Trump. His tweets have become a subject of controversial debate among researchers (Blommaert 2018, Varis 2020). The theoretical part of this paper (section 2) introduces definitions of conspiracy theories and people’s motivations to spread them. The practical part (section 3) investigates selected tweets from Trump’s account on three different conspiracy theories: (1) Trump as the truth teller, (2) downplaying of the danger of Covid-19 and (3) the latest voter fraud accusations during the 2020 US presidential elections. The analysis showed that Trump makes use of these conspiracy theories to serve his presidency and the values of his supporters. In addition, it illustrates that his conspiracist claims lack evidence and further divide the US into an in-group (conspiracy supporters) and out-group (conspiracy opponents), which is one characteristic of conspiracies (Krekó 2015). In how far these theories alter the discourse of a society needs to be analyzed and discussed in further research projects.

Keywords: conspiracy theory; US presidential election; Donald Trump; Covid-19; voter fraud allegations; Twitter

The linguistic impact of the global pandemic: Vocabulary and metaphors in times of uncertainty

In March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak of a new disease formally named “COVID-19”, an abbreviation for “coronavirus disease 2019”. This global pandemic has become one of the most frequent topics in the political debate and the public media, thus providing a fertile ground for the linguistic analysis of media reports. This study explores the vocabulary used in the news of international mainstream media between February and October 2020. A cognitive metaphor linguistic approach (following Lakoff & Johnson 1980) is used to trace some of the linguistic changes during the global pandemic, considering metaphors, fixed expressions, compounds, and collocations. This contribution is based on a corpus of news pieces published between February and October 2020 in English and Croatian, including sources from non-English-speaking countries published in English. In particular, it works with a sample of nearly 10,000 words to discuss the phases of the unwinding of the pandemic and dominant metaphors. The analysis showed that similar collocations (e.g., the new normal, social distancing) and conceptual metaphors (e.g., the disease as war, sport, natural disaster) dominate the discourse of globally situated newspapers in English and Croatian.

Keywords: lexical analysis, rhetorical tropes, naming and reference, perspective, emotions

In times of uncertainty who can we trust? – Discourse analysis of government announcements in Serbia in the time of the Coronavirus pandemic

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has brought with it uncertainty on numerous fronts to individuals all around the globe. In these times of distress citizens turn to their governments for support and leadership in the hopes of successfully overcoming the crisis. Have the citizens of Serbia been able to find that support in the information that was given to them in this period or were the levels of uncertainty escalated? This is a socio-linguistic study which implements the method of discourse analysis. The aim of the study is to explore how information, in Serbia, was conveyed to the wider public during the uncertain times of the Coronavirus pandemic, specifically from its introduction to the public until the end of the national state of emergency in Serbia. The study analyzes a number of key government announcements which were made before and during the state of national emergency had been declared in Serbia due to the Coronavirus pandemic. The national state of emergency in Serbia lasted from March 15 to May 6, 2020. The selected public announcements were transcribed and analyzed. Statements which convey the speakers’ stance towards the seriousness of the virus, the situation and the measures that needed to be taken, were extracted and sorted for conflicting information and stances. After which the statements were analyzed in regard to the levels of certainty conveyed.

Keywords: trust, uncertainty, discourse analysis, socio-linguistics, coronavirus

How feigning certainty is used by the Serbian media for the promotion of news

This research aims at exposing the discrepancy between journalists’ fake promises of predicted outcomes and the actual, not so predictable and not so optimistic, reality. Focusing on epistemic modality and on different kinds of lexical choices journalists resort to when writing article headlines, this research attempts to show how journalists deliberately try to appear certain in those pieces of news they want to sell in order to attract attention and secure readership. Relying on Critical Discourse Analysis, the conclusions in this research are drawn based on the analyses of news reports dealing with the Corona crisis in Serbia. The corpus comprises ten pieces of news compiled from online newspapers published in Serbia during the coronavirus pandemic. The results of this research suggest that, especially at times like this – when audiences seek some kind of positive reassurance and even the slightest of faith in an optimistic outcome – people often find themselves being tricked into reading optimistic-sounding news, ultimately getting disappointed by the actual reality and losing trust in the media in the process. Although this method of feigning certainty quite often results in the loss of trust, it still proves useful to those journalists wanting to promote their news no matter what.

Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis, certainty, trust, epistemic modality, Corona crisis

Media, terrorism, and trust: Ten years of foreign fighters in news discourse (2011–2021)

This research is aimed at investigating the way in which Foreign Fighters (FF) are represented by the media in English-speaking countries. FF are defined as people who voluntarily participate in a conflict that does not involve their home country. Since it is believed that they might present a real terrorist threat once they go back to their home countries, FF are a very important issue the international community is facing today. The decision to focus on media discourse lies in the fact that, as media communicates information to billions of people, their representation of FF is crucial for shaping the public perception and opinion of the matter. Applying both a corpus-driven quantitative analysis and a qualitative analysis, carried out using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this study investigates the representation of FF by English-speaking newspapers during a ten-year period, from 2011 to 2021. This pilot study, in particular, will focus on the preliminary findings of this research, obtained by analysing the keywords and collocations related to FF in a smaller sample of the corpus. The major identified discourses are those of terrorism, religion, and security.

Keywords: foreign fighters, media, discourse, Critical Discourse Analysis, corpus linguistics

Uncertainty in postgraduate training and supervision: A needs analysis for online course development.

Uncertainty and self-doubt accompany postgraduates on their personal and career development, as the dissertation project is the first independent and innovative research endeavour they undertake. This case study presents a recent needs analysis at the TU Chemnitz English Department for the development of an online workshop series on empirical linguistic research. An online questionnaire allowed students to give feedback on their perceived difficulty of 64 research aspects from the categories: research design, data collection & analysis, writing & publication, and psychology & peer review. The many discrepant results demonstrated the different specialisations and skills of the students and accordingly the challenges of structuring unified postgraduate training. The contribution elaborates on the implications of the fully online format of the workshop series and provides suggestions for productive online teaching and discussions. Customised postgraduate training is seen as a key opportunity for students to acquire demanded research skills, overcome their uncertainties, and accordingly gain self-confidence and evoke trust in the research community.

Keywords: needs analysis, uncertainty, PhD workshop, research skills, confidence

Thriving in isolation: Facilitating doctoral candidates’ confidence and writing success

The rites of passage when progressing from postgraduate to an accepted member of the academic community present numerous challenges for young researchers. Principally, the ability to publish good quality research in a suitable academic way which befits the high standard of the research is fundamental. However, the accepted ‘bar’ is sometimes seemingly unreachable for some students, and this can lead to uncertainty, self-doubt, and a subsequent withdrawal from the learning process. Similarly, some supervisors may find themselves faced with questions relating to the academic writing conventions of their discourse. Currently, universities are addressing this issue through separate academic writing provision. Considering that ‘research is writing’, students’ style will evolve alongside their research, and in this way, their needs will be timely. At a time when students are increasingly isolated in their practice, this paper argues that instructors should abandon the model of the teacher as a fountain of knowledge, and instead become a writing facilitator who enhances active learning techniques (Wingate 2007). We present ways in which academic writing can be taught at a higher level as a situated, and sustainable, social practice to improve writing confidence and success.

Keywords: academic writing, higher education, embedded teaching, uncertainty, confidence, PhD, hedges, scale-up, tutorials