THE USE OF REQUESTS IN PANDEMIC PRESS RELEASES. A CROSS-CULTURAL CASE STUDY

Abstract

The current paper presents an analysis of the realisation of requests in three European linguacultures - British English, Spanish, and Romanian - as expressed in weekly press releases during the Covid-19 pandemic. A comparative study that looks into the Request Speech Act, more precisely into its various forms of expression and its conventional realisation patterns, was conducted according to a cross-cultural pragmatic analysis framework. The conclusive observations underline the fact that each linguaculture constructs a culture-bound pattern for the realisation of the Request Speech Act, despite certain similarities explicable due to common origins or global linguistic influences.