Experimental studies have shown that narratives can be effective persuasive tools in addressing vaccine hesitancy, including regarding the vaccine against the human papillomavirus (HPV), which is transmitted via sexual contact and can cause cervical cancer. This paper presents an analysis of a thread from the online parenting forum Mumsnet Talk where an initially undecided Original Poster is persuaded to vaccinate their child against HPV by a respondent's narrative of cervical cancer that they describe as difficult to share. This paper considers this particular narrative alongside all other narratives that precede the decision announced on the Mumsnet thread. It shows how producing pro-vaccination narratives about HPV involves challenges regarding 'tellability' - what makes the events in a narrative reportable or worth telling. We suggest that this has implications for the context-dependent nature of tellability, the role of parenting forums in vaccination-related discussions, and narrative-based communication about vaccinations more generally.

This research adopts Critical Discourse Analysis as a perspective to explore how kindness was expressed and promoted in university communities and city communities from January to March in 2020 when the Covid pandemic broke out in the UK and provide a window on British culture in which kindness was expressed and promoted through discourse. It combines a qualitative method with a corpus-based quantitative method. It is found that kindness was meant for providing support and showing compassion and inclusion to community members and that strategies in lexis, syntax and metaphor can reproduce or resist the expression and promotion of kindness in communities. During the pandemic, the intentional kindness expressed by community authorities was respect of diversity rather than inclusion of different values or ethnicity and no substantial support was provided to vulnerable members even though authorities were trying to impress the public by claiming that they were making constant efforts to support the community. Case studies revealed that we should caution against the use of passivation and the pronouns like .

This paper illustrates how superdiverse youth negotiate their identity in everyday interactions during Australia's Covid-19 outbreak. The discussion is based on oral narratives collected from classroom conversations among international and local students living in Australia. The paper illustrates how participants position themselves and others in narratives, how these positionings reveal complex identity work among youth from diverse backgrounds and how identities are constructed and negotiated through stories about everyday encounters. Students' experiences of racism and microaggressions point to interethnic interactions as sites of struggle where identities come into conflict. The paper contributes to current work on identity in narrative discourse and narratives of racism.

The postmodern medical paradigm has empowered online users in the (de)legitimating process of health-related topics. By employing a co-occurrence analysis, this study identifies the thematic patterns used by Romanian online users in their multimodal comments to the #storiesfromvaccination Facebook campaign run by the Romanian government. The findings show that the commenters assessed source credibility through two thematic patterns: 'source exemplarity' and 'source distrust'. Health experts were more legitimized than laypersons and role models as sources in the COVID-19 vaccination campaign. Two thematic patterns emerged in the assessment of vaccination, namely: 'immunization - past and present challenges' and 'vaccination supporter versus opponent cleavage'. In the discussion on immunization, a polarization between a nostalgic longing for the past and a present corrupted medical and political system prevailed, whereas the important feature of discursive antagonism could be observed in the latter thematic pattern. The co-occurrences of (de)legitimation strategies are explained with reference to the political and medical context, along with the challenges of social media usage in online vaccination communication campaigns.

Using a large-scale corpus of 706 coronavirus cartoons by male and female Arab artists, this study takes a fresh and more cognitive look at sexism in multimodal discourse. Specifically, it examines the role of salience and grammar (and hence of metaphor and metonymy) in gender bias and/or in discrimination against women. It argues that both men and women are vulnerable to the influence of stereotypical and outdated beliefs that create unconscious bias. But this raises the crucial issue of whether we can speak of 'overt' sexism in images. Issues around terminology and conceptualization are thus also investigated. Importantly, this paper makes the following contributions to feminist and cross-cultural pragmatics: (i) it brings a distinctly Arabic perspective to gender and language; (ii) it expands socio-cognitive pragmatics beyond spoken and written communication; (iii) it shows a close coupling between an Arabic grammar and other aspects of culture; and (iv) it has the potential for impact beyond academia, specifically in the sphere of coronavirus care or of health communication.

COVID-19 has become a mental health pandemic. The impact on vulnerable demographic groups has been particularly severe. This paper focuses on women in employment in Hong Kong who have had to balance remote work and online schooling for over 2 years. Using semi-ethnography and theme-oriented discourse analysis, we examine 200 threads that concern members' mental health on a popular Facebook support group for mothers. We demonstrate that mental health messages are typically framed as 'troubles talk'. Other support group members actively align with a trouble-teller through 'caring responses', namely expressions of empathy and sympathy. These are realized through assessments of the trouble-teller's experience, reports of similar experiences; expressions of compassion and advice-giving. Mental health talk online is heavily mitigated, nevertheless the medium provides a space for expressing mental health troubles and providing informal psychosocial support. We advocate the importance of microanalytic discourse studies for mental health research to get insights into people's lived experiences during the pandemic.

This study attempts to generate new insights into the wide spread online and offline conspiratorial discourse on COVID-19. Twofold analytical lens consisted of narrative interrelations framework and content analysis showed how the linguistic resources and conversational such as popular socio-religious discourses, hypothetical narratives, personal narratives, personal mental archives, and interpolated arguments are integrated in the interpretation of intertextual such as Bill Gates' TED talk 2015 (26%); Nematullah Wali's predictions (32%); 'End of Days' book by Sylvia Browne (14.9%); and 'The Eyes of Darkness' novel by Dean Koontz (22%) by which the conspiracists in Pakistan construct an internally persuasive discourse promoting conspiracy theories on COVID-19. Several linguistic resources such as mood, modality, topicalization, insinuation, and intertextuality emerged as the main tools of making the conspiracy theories internally persuasive.

This paper discusses web-based public health discursive practices during the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in Nigeria. It utilises a multimodal discourse approach to explore how a combination of textual and visual resources was deployed to communicate informative and educative public health safety campaigns during the period. Essentially, this study discusses multimodal resources as a rhetorical technique for creating a public discursive engagement space designed to educate the public and mitigate the effect of the pandemic. The dataset was collected during and after the lockdown in 2020 (March-September) through media monitoring and manual downloading of relevant online COVID-19 posts, messages and public health advisories largely from WhatsApp platforms and the portals of some Nigerian national newspapers. Using insights from relevant approaches in discourse analysis (e.g. Multimodal Discourse and Critical Discourse Analysis), we adopted a qualitative content analysis approach to analyse on how online posts as multimodal resources amplify the role of social media affordances in producing and promoting public safety messages helped to control the spread and mitigate the effects of the pandemic. The study also shows that discursive and multimodal resources were deliberately deployed to increase the effectiveness of the technology-driven public health campaign. To a large extent, multimodal resources were found to complement lexico-semantic properties of online communication, where social media messages are created, crafted and reconstructed within a uniquely Nigerian public discourse context. The study further illustrates the increasing importance of web-based platforms as discursive sites for enacting and negotiating meanings during event-driven social activities and public engagement in the Global South.

In response to the threat of COVID-19, China initiated a nationwide campaign. Ideological work such as explaining the implemented policies and persuading the public always took a central role in mobilization, and it has been emphasized by Chinese government during Covid-19 as well. The legitimation discourse used in the campaign is the focus of the current study. The investigation takes into consideration the political logic of the relationship between the central and local governments as well as their working mechanism. More specifically, a total of 84 open letters written by the local governments to mobilize residents during the COVID-19 pandemic were analyzed. The study integrated the CDA perspective, legitimation theory, and campaign-style governance and examined what ideological discourses are constructed in the open letters, what type of authority is constructed for legitimation, and what is the main communication style used. In addition, the study paid attention to the patterns among the different local government ranks. The findings revealed that moral appeal and political authority were the key elements of legitimation discourse, but governments with lower ranks exhibited a trend of de-ideologization. Meanwhile, impersonal politeness and direct bold command contradictorily co-existed in open letters of basic level local governments. These finding reveal that despite the top government's centralized power, realization of ideological work in a national campaign is confined by the divergent and complicated realities of local governments.

Advancing the concept of multimodal voicing as a tool for describing user-generated online humour, this paper reports a study on humorous COVID-19 mask memes. The corpus is drawn from four popular social media platforms and examined through a multimodal discourse analytic lens. The dominant memetic trends are elucidated and shown to rely programmatically on nested (multimodal) voices, whether compatible or divergent, as is the case with the dissociative echoing of individuals wearing peculiar masks or the dissociative parodic echoing of their collective voice. The theoretical thrust of this analysis is that, as some memes are (re)posted across social media (sometimes going viral), the previous voice(s) - of the meme subject/author/poster - can be re-purposed (e.g. ridiculed) or unwittingly distorted. Overall, this investigation offers new theoretical and methodological implications for the study of memes: it indicates the usefulness of the notions of multimodal voicing, intertextuality and echoing as research apparatus; and it brings to light the epistemological ambiguity in lay and academic understandings of memes, the voices behind which cannot always be categorically known.