Andrew Kehoe

The study presented here discusses public reception of the UK-wide government restrictions and regulations in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on language use on Twitter to (1) track the prevalence of diverse opinions and changes in public perceptions and (2) reflect on clarity of official messaging. Our report relates to the four themes outlined as part of the Initial learning from the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic collated by the National Audit Office:
• transparency and public trust: providing transparent public-facing advice through clear and timely communication.
• data and evidence: monitoring public perception of government advice, identifying issues with public compliance and quantifying different types of behaviours/reactions (compliance, non-compliance, call for stricter measures), validating the effectiveness of interventions by systematically gathering and evaluating end-user feedback (comments from the public).
• coordination and delivery models: ensuring that public facing communication from
government departments, central and local government, and public sector bodies is
effectively coordinated and well-aligned.
• supporting and protecting people: understanding the pandemic’s impact on different groups and the risk of widening inequalities.
The report is based on the results of the UKRI/AHRC-funded TRAC:COVID project carried out at Birmingham City University. The first section draws on the dashboard created as part of the project, accessible online at https://traccovid.com. The dashboard is an open access tool based on 84,138,394
tweets related to coronavirus posted by users in the UK between 1st January 2020 and 30th April 2021. The tool helps explore how social media have been used in the UK during the pandemic to talk about COVID-19. Our analysis shows that throughout the pandemic there has been a widespread support for the main measures used to contain the COVID-19 virus outbreak. In fact, a considerable number of tweets supported the introduction of even stronger measures than those imposed by the
government, and many criticised non-compliance as a sign of selfish behaviour. The results also  indicate a presence of users who actively used terms related to conspiracy theories and, although these views were found to be in the minority, it is important not to underestimate the role they play in undermining the efforts to contain the pandemic. The second part of the report reflects on the comprehensibility of official messages sent from  government accounts and the accounts of public health bodies. The analysis shows a wide range of language-related problems, ranging from complex use of vocabulary and grammar and vague references to inaccurate information and potential exclusion of some of the intended recipients.

Antoinette Renouf and Andrew Kehoe: Introduction 1. Looking more closely at existing boundaries of the discipline Christian Mair: Corpus linguistics meets sociolinguistics: the role of corpus evidence in the study of sociolinguistic variation and change Joan C. Beal: Creating corpora from spoken legacy materials: variation and change meet corpus linguistics Tuija Virtanen: Discourse linguistics meets corpus linguistics: theoretical and methodological issues in the troubled relationship Turo Hiltunen and Jukka Tyrkko: 'Tis well known to barbers and laundresses: Overt references to knowledge in English medical writing from the Middle Ages to the Present Day Tanja Saily and Jukka Suomela: Comparing type counts: The case of women, men and -ity in early English letters 2. Examination of a known language feature from a new point of view Karin Aijmer: Does English have modal particles Julie Van Bogaert: A reassessment of the syntactic classification of pragmatic expressions: the positi...

This study addresses a familiar challenge in corpus pragmatic research: the search for functional phenomena in large electronic corpora. Speech acts are one area of research that falls into this functional domain and the question of how to identify them in corpora has occupied researchers over the past 20 years. This study focuses on apologies as a speech act that is characterised by a standard set of routine expressions, making it easier to search for with corpus linguistic tools. Nevertheless, even for a comparatively formulaic speech act, such as apologies, the polysemous nature of forms (cf. e.g. I am sorry vs. a sorry state) impacts the precision of the search output so that previous studies of smaller data samples had to resort to manual microanalysis. In this study, we introduce an innovative methodological approach that demonstrates how the combination of different types of collocational analysis can facilitate the study of speech acts in larger corpora. By first establishing a collocational profile for each of the Illocutionary Force Indicating Devices associated with apologies and then scrutinising their shared and unique collocates, unwanted hits can be discarded and the amount of manual intervention reduced. Thus, this article introduces new possibilities in the field of corpus-based speech act analysis and encourages the study of pragmatic phenomena in large corpora.