Understanding COVID-19 Communication: Linguistic and Discursive Perspectives

This collaborative essay addresses COVID-19 communication, focussing on the linguistic strategies and discursive constructions that were adopted, first to cope with the unprecedented crisis scenarios of the pandemic and later to hail the post-pandemic times. It recapitulates the unfolding of COVID-19 communication from 2020 to 2022, espousing a linguistic and discursive perspective. To that purpose, it elaborates on a few keywords and key phrases that consistently identify the different pandemic and post-pandemic phases in the public domain. i.e. ‘recovery and resilience’, ‘smart’ and ‘virtual’, and the ‘new normal’, to finish with a few reflections on the challenges of legal communication faced with mounting social intolerance and the exacerbation of hate speech and xenophobia. The overview privileges the European Union and the UK, the latter launching the first mass vaccination campaign in December 2020, although with the awareness of the global nature of the phenomenon and its present repercussions. The aim of the essay is to frame the nine research articles in this issue as attempts to interpret an exceptionally difficult time span and as a form of intellectual resilience.