Despite the abundance of research into conspiracy theories, including multiple studies of Covid-19 conspiracy theories in particular, user reactions to conspiracy theories are an underexplored area of social media discourse. This study aims to fill this gap by examining a dataset of humorous responses to proliferating COVID-19 conspiracy theories based on a corpus of tweets bearing the pejorative hashtag #CovidConspiracy. We report the complex orchestration of heteroglossic discursive voices in these posts to reveal their rhetorical function, oriented towards expressing a negative stance and, in some cases, amounting to ridicule. The discursive effects of this interplay of voices entail imitation, parody, mockery and irony on the micro level, while on the interactional (macro) level, anti-conspiracy tweets jointly enact what we dub "polyvocal scorn". It expresses multiple users' trenchant critique and contempt for conspiracy theories, while the humour of the tweets serves to display the users' wit and superiority over conspiracy theorists.

This paper will explore the multi-modal semiotic properties of a selection of key public health information posters issued by the UK Westminster government on the use of masks and face coverings during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using multi-modal critical discourse analysis, we show how the posters featuring masks sustained consistent government-led branding, while drawing upon what we describe as "synthetic personalisation" to manage the orientation of the crisis as the pandemic progressed. Through this analysis, the article will highlight the possible contribution of these posters to an environment characterised by political confusion and enabling of a relatively widespread rejection of mask-wearing as a public health responsibility. Examining this within a broader decline in trust in government, we suggest the various attempts to produce a positive message about mask-wearing contributed instead to the appropriation of masks as symbols of individual alignment within a contested political field.

The establishment of social distancing guidance during the first months of the Covid19 pandemic in the UK made behaviour in public spaces open to scrutiny, as observed in reports of lockdown (non)compliance in different types of media. This paper analyses a collection of 13 calls to BBC phone-ins where people publicly admit to breaking the lockdown. It offers an interactional analysis of the discursive practices with which callers their breach and build their moral personas while orienting to the accountability concerns that arise in their interaction with hosts, guest experts, and the participating audience on-air. Callers' accounts were found to be extended objects combining different action components with which they present their licences to breach, list their harm-mitigating strategies, and construct their decisions as informed and common-sensical in the light of the moral dilemmas and disruption that the lockdown introduced to their ordinary lives.

In this paper I study discursive practices of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the COVID-19 pandemic. In response to the pandemic, political leadership across the globe had to take tough decisions such as restrictions on the social and personal lives of individuals. This meant addressing concerns over ensuring compliance with these restrictions. I examine how Modi managed these concerns in his communication with the Indian polity over TV and radio broadcasts. I do so in instances where Modi gave specific instructions about following restrictions or other COVID appropriate behaviours. Using discourse analysis, I analyse data from two prominent ways of communicating in the pandemic, Mann Ki Baat and addresses to the nation. Analyses show that Modi developed two sets of non-electoral relations across his communication, which treated compliance as normatively expected: a) between Modi and Indians and b) among Indians themselves. These relations made way for treating audiences as those who are in specific social roles where duty and service were normative. Instructions and their compliance were embedded in these roles and treated as expected and consequently moral acts. Modi's discursive practices worked to perform a politics of service and duty, where compliance is ultimately treated as expected service.

This paper explores the role of a particular set of commonly occurring temporal meanings relating to the shared experience of being in a pandemic (e.g., ) and how these foster ambient affiliation on Twitter. Temporal meanings can be realised as a range of grammatical structures in texts and are linguistic resources that add meaning - in terms of dimensions such as manner, time, or place - to the main activities, entities or events in a clause. While often viewed in terms of their role in how experience is represented, we suggest they play a pivotal interpersonal role in how values are positioned and how social bonds are offered to ambient audiences. The paper also draws on communing affiliation, a system in the ambient affiliation framework for understanding how people share and contest values in social media environments, to show how these temporal meanings are functioning. Corpus-based discourse analysis of the contribution of temporal meanings to communing affiliation in a large of corpus of COVID-19 tweets was undertaken. Three major affiliation strategies that these temporal meanings were involved in were observed: centring in the service of convoking affiliation, contrasting in the service of finessing affiliation, and accentuating in the service of promoting affiliation.

The Covid-19 pandemic that swept the world in 2020 demanded action from political leaders around the world to lead their people through the crisis. Leadership in a crisis involves a range of activities, such as making responsive decisions, communicating those decisions to the public, envisioning goals, generating trust and cooperation, and appealing for collective actions. Effective communication plays an essential role in this process. New Zealand has been regarded as a successful case globally in its crisis response to the Covid-19 pandemic. This study investigates the role of language and discourse in New Zealand's Covid-19 crisis leadership and communication practices. Informed by an interactional sociolinguistics approach, the study draws on frame analysis, positioning theory, and rhetorical analysis to examine how the Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, her leadership team, and New Zealand mainstream media jointly negotiated and co-constructed the leadership discourse. Drawing on a corpus of 98 New Zealand government press briefings, a selected subset of press briefings surrounding significant events at the beginning of the first wave (March 2020) and second wave (August 2020) were coded and analyzed. The study identified a range of discursive strategies employed by Ardern at press briefing speeches and the question and answer sessions. Multiple self-positionings of Ardern and interactive positionings of the virus, the New Zealand government, and New Zealanders were identified. Ardern's metaphorical framings of the crisis as a 'fight' and the response as a collective action provided the basis for rhetorical appeals to the public in the management of the pandemic. A close examination of the ways Ardern responded to media resistance of her discursive framing demonstrated that New Zealand leadership during the pandemic was not only discursively constructed, but also jointly and collaboratively achieved by multiple actors.

The use of metaphor in framing COVID-19 has already attracted considerable attention in both academic and public debate and we have seen extensive discussion of how this pandemic might be compared to past events, such as the so-called 'Spanish flu' of the 1910s. In this paper, we draw these two strands of metaphoric framing and historical comparison together by identifying the metaphorical framings of past influenza pandemics in media and political discourse in the UK over an extended period (1890-2009). The findings show remarkable continuity in the choice and proportion of conceptual metaphor across very different sociohistorical contexts. However, this does not correspond to entrenchment of the metaphors which continue to be creative and elaborated in many cases. In terms of variation over time, the analysis shows shifts in framing with greater focus on societal effects and reactions to influenza in later periods while the agency of the virus is reduced.

While a growing body of work has focused on the interactional organization of survey interviews, little if any research in conversation and discourse analysis has examined written surveys as a form of talk-in-interaction. While survey researchers routinely examine such responses using content analysis or thematic analysis methods, this shifts the focus away from the precise language and turn constructional practices used by respondents. By contrast, in this study we examine open-ended text responses to online survey questions using a conversation analytic and discourse analytic approach. Focusing on the precise turn constructional practices used by survey respondents- specifically, how they formulate multi-unit responses and make use of turn-initial discourse markers- we demonstrate how online survey respondents treat open-ended survey questions much as they would any similar sequence of interaction in face-to-face or telephone survey talk, making online surveys a tenable source of data for further conversation analytic inquiry.