An Investigation of Intimidation Strategies in Covid-19 discourse

Abstract

With the spread of Covid-19 from China worldwide, the virus has been one of the majorly debated issues by journalists, politicians, health authorities and numerous organizations. While discussing Covid-19, Covid-19 discourse, in particular media discourse about Covid-19 creates a dichotomy between the group who is vulnerable to virus exposure and the virus through victimization of the former. Furthermore, discourse about Covid-19 employs various intimidation strategies in the dichotomization of the group and the virus. In order to explain the construal of dichotomous distance between the virus and the group, who is vulnerable to virus exposure and how intimidation strategies participate in the characterization of the virus, we adopted critical discourse analytic approach, proximization theory, which contributes to the understanding of narrowing of distance between peripheral virus entity and the group in the form of home entity through the identification of spatial and temporal lexico-grammatical markers. According to the results, intimidating elements, adopted by media discourse about Covid-19, such as negative metaphorization, modality markers, historical flashbacks, frequent emphasis on preemptive action against Covid-19, characterize the virus intrusion in the form of peripheral entity as negatively within spatio-temporal dichotomy and build credible writer or speaker who use these strategies as a means of convincing people in order to legitimate claims about the danger of Covid-19 and the need for preparedness against it.