Establishing confidence and trust in online academic discourse: Linguistic cues to bridge digital distance.

Negotiating truth between persuasive pro-vaccination memes and users’ comments on 9gag.

The present research focuses on how the truth about COVID-19 vaccination is negotiated in the comment sections accompanying predominantly pro-vaccination memes on the humorous website 9gag. A total of 341 comments in response to 25 memes were included in the corpus, which was subsequently analysed within the framework of van Dijk’s theory of Sociocognitive Discourse Studies (SCDS). SCDS postulates the existence of a sociocognitive interface between discourse and society, and emphasises mental models as one of the most important features of cognition. The most common discourse structures identified in the corpus were opinion and emotion words, as well as global topics and themes. The paper hypothesises that despite overwhelmingly persuasive pro-vaccination content on the website, the comment section will reveal distinct division into at least two opposing groups with different mental models pertaining to vaccination. In times of crisis, the truth about vaccination as one of the most controversial aspects of the pandemic seems to be negotiated and co-created through the interaction of these mental models in the multimodal dialogue between content creators and users on 9gag.

Keywords: COVID-19 vaccination, sociocognitive discourse structures, memes, comment sections, mental models, negotiation of truth

The Virus Caught in a Web of Humour

In 2020 and 2021, the global pandemic has become one of the most important topics in social media and private discourse. People often rely on humour as a potential coping mechanism during severe health crises. It challenges social conventions, taboos and the moral order of society. This study will focus on the role of humour at the time of the Covid-19 pandemic. It aims to explore the role of verbal and visual humour in virtual communication, to attain a better understanding of the cognitive and affective components of humour used in the ‘corona discourse’, and to provide a common pattern underlying the humourous reaction to the global pandemic.

This paper presents the results of a data-based COVID-19 humour survey. Qualitative content analysis and multimodal data analysis were carried out on a limited number of verbal and visual jokes shared on social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, blogs) and online newspapers between February and August 2020. Cognitive theory is outlined (Lakoff & Johnson 1980, Kövecses 2010, Attardo 2006, Giora 1991, Coulson 2003, Latta 1999) and used in the analysis of the selected sample. The findings revealed six contrastive frames underlying the perception of Covid-19: animals vs. human beings, human beings vs. animals, death vs. life, ethnic groups vs. ethnic groups with unfamiliar behaviour, inanimate entity (object) vs. animate entity, and positive government regulations vs. negative government regulations.

Keywords: humour, metaphor, Covid-19, public discourse, media

The question of trust during the crisis-promoted online teaching

The existence of trust is one of the integral prerequisites for successful teaching and learning. In online education trust is more difficult to build and maintain and therefore requires a more prominent place in the teaching process. With the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and the fast and forceful transition form face to face teaching to crisis promoted online teaching, the question of trust in education has become even more relevant. The aim of the present paper is to explore students’ levels of trust in the crisis-promoted online teaching. The subjects of the study are students at the Preschool Teacher Training College “Mihailo Palov” in Vršac. The study explores the questions of how much trust the students had in the education process during the school year 2020/2021, how they accepted the different online teaching solutions presented to them and which of the practices increased and decreased the levels of trust that the students felt. The study implements a quantitative and a qualitative approach by implementing a questionnaire and conducting semi-structured in depth interviews with students. An overview of the results is given together with suggestions for improvements in the development and nurturing of trust in the online education process.

Keywords: trust, crisis-promoted online teaching, students, best practices

Changes in the English Language and the Importance of Language Use During Pandemics

Building Trust in Mental Health Related Texts: Approaching Online Readers’ Positive and Negative Face

This paper focuses on trust building pragmatic strategies applied in texts about mental health, used to help readers preserve their positive and negative face, i.e., the more social and more self-sufficient part of the readers’ self-image, in order to gain their trust. This construction of trust allows the text to be more helpful to the readers. The corpus used in this research consists of texts written during April and May 2021, compiled from one Facebook page and one website dedicated to mental health. The aim of this contribution is to show, through qualitative analysis, in what way and to what extent strategies from politeness theory are being used in these texts. The analysis also addresses the politeness strategies used with regards to the sensitivity of the topic and specific functions of these texts. The analysis confirms that trust building strategies can successfully diminish the effect of face threatening acts, but also that the framework could be expanded to grasp the meaning and context beside the form of the message.

Keywords: politeness theory, positive face, negative face, trust, mental health discourse

Speech Acts in the COVID-19 Political Discourse: Inspiring Public (Mis)trust

The present study investigates the utilisation of speech acts in the COVID-19 discourse. The findings revealed that both productive and non-productive types of linguistic manipulation (Asya 2013) can be accomplished via utterances that contain: lexical verb in the imperative form, the verbs be and get in the imperative form and the participle I or II, and the verb let in combination with the first-person plural pronoun we. According to Ghazala (2011), techniques such as transitivity, modality, permutation, innuendo, and lexico-semantic manipulation serve the purpose of exploitation as performed by the media. Whereas previous studies have shown those means of manipulation to be effective, this study focuses on modality and transitivity.

This paper explores the degree to which old and contemporary sources aim to deceive their readers by misinformation. Mainly, the paper focuses on the media coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic through the contrastive analysis between the discourse of Anthony Fauci and Vili Beroš. The corpus consists of 149 media statements from February 2020 to October 2021, out of which 74 pertain to Beroš and 75 to Fauci.

The results of the analysis show that the discourse of the two public figures changes to a different extent with the development of the insights around the pandemic. Still, the imperative form, the passive voice, as well as emotionally charged words are the main markers of their COVID-19 disourse. The linguistic engineering behind the language of Beroš and Fauci exists in proportion to their role in politics. Beroš and Fauci use political speech which can have manipulative purposes and its persuasion depends on the evoked (mis)trust.

Keywords: speech acts, discourse analysis, fake news, COVID-19, Beroš, Fauci

Creating Trust Through Cohesion in Academic Writing: Supporting Macedonian English Major Undergraduates

For successful written communication in English, the appropriate use of cohesive devices (CDs) to create a cohesive and coherent academic text is of utmost importance. Many researchers have investigated their use across a variety of text types (argumentative, expository and data commentary texts), as well as the relationship between these devices and writing quality (Meisuo 2000; Rahimi 2011; Modhish 2012; Liu and Braine 2005; Jalilifar 2008; Duckinoska-Mihajlovska and Joshevska-Petrushevska forthcoming). However, the results of these studies point to different directions. The frequency of use of cohesive devices does not necessarily lead to higher writing quality.

The present classroom-based research aims to identify the subcategories of conjunctive cohesive devices which are frequently used by Macedonian L1 English major undergraduates in their argumentative essays and investigate whether task-fulfilment is dependent on the use of CDs to express logical connections and create trust in the reader. A total of 32 argumentative essays written by Macedonian L1 first-year English major students at the Department of English Language and Literature at UKIM Skopje were analysed. The results identified that the most commonly used conjunctive relations are of the additive type. The contribution explores how successfully the students express logical connections by using these devices and create trust in the reader. In addition, academic writing course instructors are expected to make informed decisions about the academic writing syllabus based on these findings.

Keywords: conjunctive cohesive devices, argumentative essays, logical connections and task fulfillment, trust

The Represenation of the Russo-Ukrainian Conflict in Macedonian and Croatian Online Newspaper Headlines

This research aims to investigate the representation of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian conflict through the usage of linguistic features and discursive devices employed by two Croatian and two Macedonian online newspapers. The data were gathered from the newspapers’ official websites and eighty headlines in total were analysed. By implementing Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the research relies on the CDA framework proposed by Fairclough (1995). The data is categorized into five sections: lexical choice, scare tactics, direct speech, emotive language, and the use of scare quotes. The results show that both newspapers make use of similar lexical choice, rely on quotations to lend authority to their story and criticise the political practices of Russia. Differences in the lexical choice demonstrate the different editorial policies of both newspapers or possibly personal views and beliefs of the journalists. The Macedonian newspapers prefers subtle criticism, whereas the analysis of some headlines taken from the Croatian newspapers show a greater freedom of expression and explicit condemnation.

Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis, linguistic features, discursive devices, Russo-Ukrainian Conflict