Authority and solidarity on the Estonian COVID-19 signs: In line with the government's guidelines, we ask you to wear a mask

Abstract

This article presents the results of a quantitative analysis of 900 Estonian COVID-19 door signs, which were studied to investigate the linguistic means of establishing and maintaining contact between the sign's author (institution) and the addressee (client). Malinowski's notion of “phatic communion” and Laver's notions of “self-oriented” and “other-oriented” utterances as means for expressing status relations—authority and solidarity—between the participants of the communication act were used to establish four types of grammatical person usage on the COVID-19 signs: (1) “neither 1st nor 2nd person”; (2) “1st person only”; (3) “2nd person only”, and (4) “both 1st and 2nd person”. Grammatical person of personal pronouns and verb forms were included. The presence and absence of two other means for expressing authority—the imperative mood and lexical expressions of authority—were analyzed within these four types of grammatical person usage. The most important difference emerged between the signs belonging to the types “2nd person only” (i.e., signs with only other-oriented 2nd person, without 1st person) and “both 1st and 2nd person” (i.e., signs with both self-oriented 1st person and other-oriented 2nd person). On the signs belonging to the type “2nd person only” that, relying on Laver, express the higher status of the sender of the message in relation to the receiver of the message, the authors of the signs use significantly more imperative mood and less refer to an authority outside the communication act, thus putting themselves in the role of authority. However, on the signs belonging to the type “both 1st and 2nd person” that, relying on Laver, express the solidarity of the sender of the message with the addressee, the authors of the signs seem less inclined to assume the role of authority (using less imperative mood) and rather call the reader of the sign to submit to some higher authority (using lexical expressions of authority, e.g., Vabariigi Valitsus “Government of the Republic”, Terviseamet “Health Board”, etc.) to which the author of the sign and the addressee are both in a subordinate position and, therefore, of equal status.

Isiku mitu nägu kriisisuhtluses

“…Kasutame seda koroonadiskursuse (vt nt ka Jones (toim.) 2021; Ogiermann & Bella 2021;Tragel & Habicht 2021;Tragel & Pikksaar 2023) ja eesti keele vormivahendite funktsioonide (Pajusalu 2009(Pajusalu , 2017Erelt 2017) selgitamisel.…”

Introducing the keyconcept approach to the analysis of language: the case of regulation in COVID-19 diaries

“…A number of studies analyse COVID-19 signage communication, such as Tragel and Pikksaar (2022) and Bagna and Bellinzona (2023). The current paper contributes to the developing body of work that is concerned with the language used during the pandemic by the general public rather than institutions (see also Cowie et al, 2022;Wilding et al, 2023).…”

“…Linguistic research has explored public health messaging from the government and related agencies (e.g., Kalocsányiová et al, 2021 ; Strange, 2022 ) and the media (Jaworska, 2021 ; Müller et al, 2021 ; Semino, 2021 ; Yu et al, 2021 ; Kania, 2022 ; Bafort et al, 2023 ; Giorgis et al, 2023 ). A number of studies analyse COVID-19 signage communication, such as Tragel and Pikksaar ( 2022 ) and Bagna and Bellinzona ( 2023 ). The current paper contributes to the developing body of work that is concerned with the language used during the pandemic by the general public rather than institutions (see also Cowie et al, 2022 ; Wilding et al, 2023 ).…”

Commentary: How to have agency in a pandemic

“…Robinson et al ( 2023 ), for example, examine how agency the loss of agency was lexically and grammatically encoded in the way people talked about regulation; Wilding et al ( 2023 ) show how older adults in isolation negotiated their loss of agency through their use of metaphors, and Cowie et al ( 2022 ) describe the ways people coped with the disrupted relationship between structure and agency that came from forced immobility through the production of chronotopic discourse. In others, attention to the issue of agency is more implicit, though no less central, Tragel and Pikksaar ( 2022 ), for instance, focusing on how relationships of authority and solidarity were constructed in regulatory discourses about mask wearing, Bafort et al ( 2023 ) addressing mediatized debates about personal freedom and privacy associated with COVID-19 telephone contact tracing, Kania ( 2022 ) discussing how practices of naming COVID-19 in media discourse revealed underlying ideological projects to assign responsibility for the pandemic to radicalized others, Giorgis et al ( 2023 ) documenting the ways metaphors of warfare used by the governments functioned both as calls to action and constraints on agency in different countries, and Banga and Bellinzona ( 2023 ) exploring how municipal spaces became arenas in which negotiations among regulatory and transgressive discourses played out. In all of these treatments of the pandemic, discourse is presented as the primary means through which agency was claimed and constrained, power was exercised and resisted, and responsibility was assigned and denied.…”

“…They are, in fact, mutually constitutive. “The enacting of agency”, he writes (2004, p. 454), “its coming into being—relies on and simultaneously affects the encoding—how human action is depicted through linguistic means”, a point that is made abundantly clear in a number of the papers in this collection, from the way the encoding of agency on public signs (see Tragel and Pikksaar, 2022 ; Banga and Bellinzona, 2023 ) provides people with the means to manage social relationships and enact or resist regulations, to the ways the encoding of agency in people's everyday talk can sometimes function as a means of reclaiming agency or challenging those who seek to constrain us (see Cowie et al, 2022 ; Robinson et al, 2023 ; Wilding et al, 2023 ).…”