#Covid-19

The past year has affected all of us in one way or another but have you ever thought about what effect it may have had on our language?  Philipp Wicke and Mariana Bolognesi did just that in their study of thousands of tweets posted during March and April 2020.

Due to social distancing measures, people were quick to use social media platforms like Twitter to connect with others and express their feelings, sending around 16,000 tweets an hour with hashtags like #coronavirus, #Covid-19 and #Covid. The researchers wanted to explore this online discourse and were particularly interested in how the pandemic was discussed using the metaphor of war. Discourse about disease has often been found to use this metaphor and cancer patients frequently complain that they are described as being in a 'battle' with the illness, which they find negative and unhelpful. With this in mind, Wicke and Bolognesi decided to also explore other figurative ways in which Covid was being described.

They collected 25,000 tweets a day that contained at least one of eight covid-related hashtags. Retweets were not included nor were more than one tweet per user in order to gain a balanced view of language use. 5.32% of the collected tweets mentioned war, the most common words being 'fight' (29.76% of these mentions) and 'war' (10.08%), whilst 'combat', 'threat' and 'battle' were also prevalent. The researchers noted that this could reflect this early stage of the pandemic: it was a global emergency and urgent action was needed to confront the situation. Most of these examples referred specifically to the treatment of the virus and the 'frontline' workers dealing with its effects in hospital.

When they concentrated on other figurative ways in which Covid was being described they found it referred to in terms of a storm, a monster and a tsunami.  For example, the idea of the virus as a storm arose in 1.49% of the tweets and contained words like 'thunderstorm', 'rain' and 'lightning'; 1.13% of the tweets referred to a tsunami, using words like 'earthquake', 'disaster' and 'tide' and references to a monster occurred in 0.68% of the tweets with 'freak', 'demon' and 'devil' being prime examples. These negative images mainly referred to the onset and spread of the virus. It is clear, however, that the war metaphor was used significantly more than these others.

Wicke and Bolognesi conclude that their results confirm previous findings that the war metaphor is common in public discourse of disease; however, they found that it was used very particularly during the first weeks of the pandemic to refer to the initial medical response to it. They also suggest that all of these metaphors are negative and unhelpful and propose the construction of a 'Metaphor Menu', previously suggested with regards to cancer, to give the public more positive and desirable ways to talk about Covid 19 as the pandemic evolves and changes.

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Wicke P., M. M. Bolognesi (2020) Framing COVID-19: How we conceptualize and discuss the pandemic on Twitter. PLoS ONE 15(9): e0240010. 

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0240010

This summary was written by Gemma Stoyle

Does Gaga ‘live for the applause’? Or, is it more of a ‘Poker Face’?

As one of the best-selling pop artists of our time, Lady Gaga is a name few would fail to recognise. From ‘Poker Face’ to ‘Telephone’, her artistry has earned her a level of notoriety comparable only to a few other music legends. Along with her success, she’s built a loyal fanbase that she affectionately refers to as the ‘Little Monsters’. At shows, she often invites her ‘Little Monsters’ on stage, whilst at other times, she’s surprised her fans by appearing at a movie premier. Here, Lady Gaga appears to navigate between her identity as an international superstar whilst simultaneously appealing to her fans to recognise her as an ‘ordinary person’. But, how does Gaga manage these apparently conflicting identities and what linguistic devices does she use to achieve this? In her 2018 paper, Mary-Caitlyn Valentinsson decided to find out:

To examine the ways in which Gaga navigates the ‘ordinary person’ and ‘celebrity superstar’ identities, Valentinsson examines tweets sent by Gaga aimed at her fans and transcripts taken from media interviews with Gaga.

A group of Lady Gaga's superfans - her 'Little Monsters'

Central to Valentinsson’s analysis are the concepts of stance and stance-taking. These two terms describe two aspects of communication. The term ‘stance’ refers to the way that people align or position themselves in relation to some object, person or idea. So when a speaker expresses their attitude towards something, that speaker is taking a stance. The notion of stance-taking refers to the actual process of making that alignment, which is usually achieved through communication. For instance, if you said, ‘I don’t like cheese’, you'd be taking a stance that you ‘don’t like the dairy goodness of cheese’. The Stance-taking bit would be you actually saying those words.

To examine Lady Gaga’s stances in relation to her fans and journalists, Valentinsson first turns to Gaga’s Twitter account where she observes that Gaga often creates a stance of alignment with the ‘ordinary people’. She does this through a number of linguistic strategies. For instance, in one tweet aimed at her fans, Gaga uses terms usually associated with the family (‘mommy’, ‘kids’, ‘mother’) to take a stance of intimacy that allows her to align with her fans. In another tweet, which references the two awards that Gaga won at the People’s Choice Awards, she uses the third-person pronoun ‘we’ in the sentence: ‘we won two people’s choice awards’ to include her fans as recipients of the awards. In other contexts, Gaga uses the @ function of Twitter to ‘speak’ to her fans directly, referencing an awareness of issues effecting her fans in real life. Together, these ‘strategies’ allow Lady Gaga to create a stance of alignment with her fans, rejecting her celebrity status, therefore presenting herself as an ‘ordinary person’. 

             

In interviews with journalists, however, Valentinsson observes an altogether different set of strategies used by Gaga. In these contexts, Gaga adopts a relatively confrontational stance. She does this by refusing to answer questions she deems inappropriate or correcting journalists’ comments about her stage performance. For instance, in one interview, asked whether the sexual references in her songs would negatively influence her record sales, Gaga responds by confronting the interviewer with her achievement of selling 4 million records. Valentinsson argues that, by taking these stances, Gaga explicitly creates a stance of disalignment with the ‘media enterprise’ and reinforces her earlier identity as an ‘ordinary person’.

Concluding, Valentinsson argues that Gaga maintains an ‘ordinary persona’ by engaging in stance taking moves that emphasise her alignment with her fans above all other audiences. So, it seems, at least Gaga is not a ‘Judas’ afterall and she’s certainly not as ‘Shallow’ as the media would like you to believe…

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Valentinsson, Mary-Caitlyn (2018). Stance and the construction of authentic celebrity persona. Language in Society 47, 715–740.

doi:10.1017/S0047404518001100

This summary was written by Christian Ilbury

Good morning customer, how may I help you?

If you’ve ever gone to get a takeaway drink from Starbucks, you’re probably aware that they like to take your name and write it on the cup. If you’re someone whose name is even vaguely unusual or uncommon, you’re probably also aware of how infuriating it is when the poor barista mangles your name when trying to write it on the side. “Why do they even bother?”, you may have thought in such situations.

Whilst not entirely related to coffee shops, Anna Kristina Hultgren of the Open University looked into the politeness strategies of people working in call centres. Her aim was to compare the best practices with the actual interactions that call centre agents do. In particular, she noted an increasing trend of using vocatives – that exact trait where people constantly call you by your name – and considered how this could be accounted for.

Customer service was originally defined as being a “face-to-face” interaction, which orientated around what the customer desired from it, and the server’s obligation to fulfil the customer’s wishes. As Hultgren notes, the rise of call centres has changed this somewhat, along with what she calls the rationalisation of customer service interactions. This involves them being efficient, predictable, controlled, and calculable. (So yes, when you’re ringing up to query your phone bill and the person on the other end sounds like a robot, it is because they have to follow these four principles.) However, this still needs to be balanced with the fairly basic task of treating the caller like a human being. So how does this work?

                Madam, much as I would LOVE to spend another hour hearing about how your geraniums are doing, can you please just tell me what is wrong with your bill?

Hultgren looked at one particular call centre in Scotland, which specialised in pensions. She looked at the manuals that were provided to agents on training, and then researched the working practices of the call centre. This included on-site observations of the agents at work, a corpus of 79 call centre transactions, and interviews with call agents as well as their managers. Hultgren looked at 21 different rules that applied to the customer service interactions, dividing them into transactional  rules (ones which focused on the call being efficient and saving money) and interactional rules (ones which focused on the customer care element).

Naturally, given the rationalisation of the interactions, Hultgren found that, where the opportunity arose, transactional rules took priority. Of the interactional rules, the ones that were most frequently used were the aforementioned vocatives – giving the customer a “verbal handshake” by asking for their name, and then using it regularly throughout the interaction.

Why is this? Some of the other interactional rules included small talk and personalised greetings. The problem with small talk is the possibility that the agent will lose control of the conversation, and risk being too inefficient. Meanwhile, personalising greetings requires a lot of effort on the part of the agent, which they may not be able to expend when they have targets to meet. However, there is still the requirement to personalise the call, and the easiest way to do this is to use the customer’s name. Therefore, the use of vocatives sticks. 

Hultgren theorises that this shows a new politeness strategy, called rationalised politeness, which has emerged from the economic, social and technological conditions of such interactions. When the overall goal is to make money, and the lack of face-to-face communication constricts the personal aspect of the conversation, there are limited ways for agents to engage with the customers.

It remains to be seen how much further this new form of politeness will spread. But if you're annoyed with Starbucks getting your name wrong every time, consider that you may well have to get used to it – this trend seems to be here to stay.

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Hultgren, Anna Kristina  (2017). Vocatives as rationalized politeness: Theoretical insights from emerging norms in call centre service encounters. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 21(1), 90-111.

doi. 10.1111/josl.12224

This summary was written by Marina Merryweather