Political speeches as a tool of Covid19 crisis management?

Abstract

This study focuses on crisis communication in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Serbia, and North Macedonia during the first, second, and third pandemic waves and takes a comparative pragmatics approach. By focusing on pragmatic features, such as speech acts and discursive/linguistic aspects of communicated values, we examine how the Covid19 crisis management is realized on the linguistic micro-level in political speeches as a salient genre of political discourse. Our study shows that the most distinct benefit of political speeches compared to other tools of crisis communication is that they forge transindividual identity, a sense of community, and highlight desired social values. In contrast, political speeches can block effective crisis communication when they exhibit high levels of intertextuality, are saturated with information, and over-aggregation.