Ambiguity, responsibility and political action in the UK daily COVID-19 briefings.
This paper investigates how pronouns were used by UK government speakers to allocate responsibility to themselves and others in all 92 daily televised COVID-19 briefings that were held between March and June 2020. We identified the referent for every use of the first-person plural pronoun (1PL) as '...
| Publicado en: | Critical Discourse Studies Vol. 21; no. 1; pp. 76 - 92 |
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| Autores principales: | , |
| Formato: | Artículo |
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Taylor & Francis Ltd
Jan2024
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=174522211&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 174522211 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 17405904 RF5 jtl: Critical Discourse Studies issn: 17405904 maglogo: Y pubinfo: dt: Jan2024 vid: 21 iid: 1 pid: 377 pub: Taylor & Francis Ltd artinfo: ui: 174522211 10.1080/17405904.2022.2110132 ppf: 76 ppct: 16 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 1.2MB tig: atl: Ambiguity, responsibility and political action in the UK daily COVID-19 briefings. aug: au: Williams, Jamie Wright, David affil: Department of English, Linguistics, and Philosophy, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK su: COVID-19 Ambiguity Pronouns Viral transmission Responsibility United Kingdom sug: subj: United Kingdom COVID-19 Ambiguity Pronouns Viral transmission Responsibility keyword: coronavirus health communication political discourse pronominal ambiguity pronouns responsibility ab: This paper investigates how pronouns were used by UK government speakers to allocate responsibility to themselves and others in all 92 daily televised COVID-19 briefings that were held between March and June 2020. We identified the referent for every use of the first-person plural pronoun (1PL) as 'inclusive', 'exclusive', or 'ambiguous' and analysed the transitivity patterns in which these pronouns act as Participants. We argue that the UK government uses the inherent ambiguity of this pronoun to strategically mitigate their own responsibility for controlling the spread of the virus, while increasing the amount of responsibility to the general public. In doing so, we propose a transparent and replicable systematic method for identifying the referents of pronouns, which may be useful to other discourse analysts faced with the challenging task of pronoun resolution. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: Copyright of Critical Discourse Studies is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. item: Critical Discourse Studies holder: Taylor & Francis Ltd dt: @attributes: year: 2024 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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