About this Research Topic
The proposed volume reflects on the Coronavirus pandemic as a still evolving phenomenon and captures critically its socially constructed dimension. The papers by well-established international contributors deal with a variety of themes that range from the different discourses of the first and second lockdown; the comparative responses to Covid in different parts of the world, in light of the relationship between language and culture; and the reflection of who the actors are, who talk and are talked about, in relation to the pandemic. This last theme, in particular, offers a wide variety of responses, from politicians’ and health experts’ communiqués to the voices of marginal individuals and groups like the refugees. The overall questions the papers as a whole try to answer is whether the discourses of and around Covid are equalizing or inciting inequality, whether they perpetuate existing structures of dominance and exclusion and if and how they contributed to language change. The volume offers an opportunity to both discourse analysts and sociolinguists to cross paths and work together. The variety of analytic approaches adopted in both linguistic fields, from corpus-assisted and computational approaches, to survey and interview-based studies, guarantees a ground-breaking interdisciplinary volume, with contributions designed to include linguistic analysis at all levels including the plane of grammatical description, lexis, phonology and discourse analysis.
The three editors, Drs Roberta Piazza, Justyna Robinson and Prof Rodney Jones, have solid expertise both as writers and volume editors, as well as book and article referees. The volume follows a very successful conference the first two editors organised in October 2021 at their home institution “The Language of Covid-19: Discourse analytic and sociolinguistic approaches to an ‘unprecedented’ health crisis”. Prof Jones was the first plenary speaker at that conference and reported on an on-going Covid research project. The editors have selected a number of suitable abstracts, agree with the contributors the end of March submission date, and will ensure external peer review for the final paper submissions.
Our agile and dynamic project will consist of 6,000 word max contributions that will be solidly supported by linguistic evidence. We plan to arrange the multiple contributions around sub-themes such as traditional and social media, health communication, and institutional discourse versus community responses and open the volume with a paper by Prof Rodney Jones, also the third editor, on socially constructed tribal (dis)affiliations during Covid, following an editorial or brief introduction by the editors.
The three editors, Drs Roberta Piazza, Justyna Robinson and Prof Rodney Jones, have solid expertise both as writers and volume editors, as well as book and article referees. The volume follows a very successful conference the first two editors organised in October 2021 at their home institution “The Language of Covid-19: Discourse analytic and sociolinguistic approaches to an ‘unprecedented’ health crisis”. Prof Jones was the first plenary speaker at that conference and reported on an on-going Covid research project. The editors have selected a number of suitable abstracts, agree with the contributors the end of March submission date, and will ensure external peer review for the final paper submissions.
Our agile and dynamic project will consist of 6,000 word max contributions that will be solidly supported by linguistic evidence. We plan to arrange the multiple contributions around sub-themes such as traditional and social media, health communication, and institutional discourse versus community responses and open the volume with a paper by Prof Rodney Jones, also the third editor, on socially constructed tribal (dis)affiliations during Covid, following an editorial or brief introduction by the editors.
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
