Emotional Context of Newspaper Articles about Covid-19

Abstract

This paper explores the newspaper texts about Covid-19 from the point of view of emotions. New Zealand has been chosen for the country where Coronovirus pandemic was kept at bay for a long time. But after the cases started to escalate, the situation changed and the tone of newspapers changed, too. The analysis showed the dependence of emotions in the texts and the rise of Covid-19 cases as an indicator of danger. The article analyses three phases of the situation in New Zealand with Covid, such as phase 1 when the number of new cases was controlled, phase 2 when the number of new cases was quickly escalating, and phase 3 when the number of new cases was still high but not so quickly changing. The corpora were analyzed from the point of view of negative and positive reaction to the situation of pandemic escalation in the world and in New Zealand. The findings show a strong relation of the social and textual contexts.