The Language of Crisis in the ‘Virocene’

Abstract

The article is part of an ongoing research project investigating the climate and health nexus in EU policy-making discourse and communication (Bevitori and Russo 2023). Combining the theoretical and methodological tools of critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics (inter alia, Baker 2023; Baker and McEnery 2015; Mautner 2015), the research for this study extends its scope by focusing on a specialized corpus, purposefully compiled to represent EU public communication discourse in the pandemic era (2020-2022). It draws on recent work on the politics and management of the Covid-19 virus as the expression of a wider politics and discourse of crisis (Krzyżanowski et al. 2023; Wodak 2022; 2021; Lipscy 2020) to investigate legitimation and consensus-building strategies in the discursive construction of the Covid-19 and climate change crises.

Keywords

• Covid-19 crisis
• climate change crisis
• EU policy-making and communication discourse
• framing
• legitimation