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

Abstract

Using the Mass Observation corpus of 12th of May Diaries, we investigate concepts that are characteristic of the first coronavirus lockdown in the UK. More specifically, we extract and analyse concepts which are distinctive of the discourses produced in May 2020 in relation to concepts used in the 10 previous years, 2010–2019. In the current paper we focus on the concept of regulation, which we identify through a novel approach to querying semantic content in large datasets. Typically, linguists look at keywords to understand differences between two datasets. We demonstrate that taking the perspective of a keyconcept rather than the keyword in linguistic analysis is a beneficial way of identifying trends in broader patterns of thoughts and behaviours which reflect lived-experiences that are particularly prominent of a given dataset, which, in this current paper, is the COVID-19 era dataset. In order to contextualise the keyconcept analysis, we investigate the discourses surrounding the concept of regulation. We find that diarists communicate collective experience of limited individual agency, surrounded by feelings of fear and gratitude. Diarists' reporting on events is often fragmented, focused on new information, and firmly placed in a temporal frame.

Commentary: How to have agency in a pandemic

“…It is the way words are grammaticalized—that is, brought into relationships with other words—and the ways they are enmeshed in broader networks of associations, ideas, stories, and discourses, that make them such powerful tools for enacting and encoding agency. This is why Robinson et al ( 2023 ) approach of “concept mapping” turns out to be such a useful way to interrogate the relationship between language and agency in the context of the pandemic. Their analysis of a corpus of 12 May Diaries from the Mass Observation Project reveals, perhaps not surprisingly, that REGULATION was a key concept in people's talk about COVID, manifested in their use of a cluster of interrelated words such as limitation, restriction, clampdown, freeze, timing, and coordination.…”

“…But even actions that could presumably be attributed to institutional actors such as the Government were often expressed in ways that hid responsibility for the action (e.g., the “easing of restrictions”). It is not so much that people constructed themselves as victims of other people (or entities) that were imposing restrictions on them, but rather that restrictions themselves seemed to take on “a life of their own” (Robinson et al, 2023 ). The key insight here is how the pandemic, for these particular diarists, and for people more generally, resulted in a pervasive “de-agentivation” of social actors (van Leeuwen, 2008 , p. 23–74), a sense that nobody was in control of anything, which engendered a kind of collective gesture of surrender in the way people talked about the situation.…”

“…Some of these articles address issues of agency explicitly. 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.…”

“…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 ).…”

“…A focus on language alone, however, is not sufficient to fully appreciate the complex, socially situated negotiations of agency described by the authors of these papers, most of whom align more with discourse analytical approaches in which agency is not just something that is encoded in language, and not just a matter of an individual's capacity to act, but rather is an interactional accomplishment that is as “intrinsically historical and situated” (Robinson et al, 2023 ) deeply embedded in social practices (Bourdieu, 1977 ; Giddens, 1984 ) and contingent on relationships of power, which are, in part, produced and reproduced through discourse (Foucault, 1995 ). This perspective is better captured by Ahearn ( 2001 , p. 112, emphasis mine) more concise definition of agency as “the socioculturally mediated capacity to act”.…”