STANCE MARKING IN COVID-19 TWEETS: A DISCOURSE-PRAGMATIC APPROACH

Abstract

This paper discusses the discourse-pragmatic stance marking in COVID-19 related tweeting. Twitter as a dynamic form of public communication may enable the user to share personal opinion, beliefs and attitude especially in times of global crises. Stance, which constitutes the materialization of speakers assessment, emotionality, or stance toward a topic, is important in the way that users participate in the discourse of the pandemic. The present paper corpus-analyses a display of COVID-19 tweets through the prism of a discourse-pragmatic approach in order to look at the range and purposes of the stance marking, as well as hedging markers (such as, hedges, intensifiers, evaluative language). Analysis shows that the COVID-19 tweets that have been marked with stances differ considerably based on the context with a great difference on various topics such as government responses, health policies, and the conversations about the vaccines. The present work is useful in addressing the construction of stance in social media discourse in the context of a global crisis and the opportunities it creates in forming the opinion of the population and dissemination of information. The research covers a gap in the literature since it studies the pragmatics of stance of pandemic-related tweets.