Language and Linguistics | Cambridge Core

The Covid-19 Pandemic

Blog post: Linguistic Reflections of a coronaspeak year

"Well, what a year this has been! A year like no other. Where life and even the way we interact changed.

It is inevitable then that many of our authors blogged about the virus, its impact on not only us, but also our language. As Michael Toolan reflects ‘…as with every new phenomenon with the potential to turn our world upside down, our first response, immediate and intimate but with potential to go global, is in our language."

Read the full post on our Linguistics blog, Cambridge Extra

Coming soon: Viral Discourse

Series: Elements in Applied Linguistics
Edited by Rodney H. Jones, University of Reading

This Element consists of ten short pieces written by prominent discourse analysts in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Each piece focuses on a different aspect of the pandemic, from the debate over wearing face masks to the metaphors used by politicians and journalists in different countries to talk about the virus. Each of the pieces also makes use of a different approach to analysing discourse (e.g. Critical Discourse Analysis, Genre Analysis, Corpus Assisted Discourse Analysis) and demonstrates how that approach can be applied to a small set of data. The aim of the Element is to show how the range of tools available to discourse analysts can be brought to bear on a pressing, 'real-world' problem, and how discourse analysis can contribute to formulating 'real-world' solutions to the problem.