Technical vocabulary in government spoken communications: The team of five million in bubbles, PPE and CBACs

Abstract

The New Zealand government delivered regular 1 p.m. televised COVID-19 briefings from March 2020. These events had a crucial communicative function and were usually headed by top government and medical officials. This study focuses on technical vocabulary in a corpus made up of these briefings, including single words (grouped into technical word families) and acronyms (e.g., bubble and PPE) as well as the most frequent two to five-word multiword units (MWUs; e.g., case numbers, genomic sequencing, and chains of transmission) containing at least one technical single-word family member. The corpus consists of 20 prepared speeches: 10 each in 2020 and 2021 by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Director-General of Health Dr. Ashley Bloomfield (50,782 tokens). The results showed that 6.02% of the single-word families (e.g., outbreak(-s), contact(-s/-less)) in the texts were technical, which may present a challenge for comprehension. Unsurprisingly, the Director-General of Health used more technical vocabulary than the Prime Minister. The top 20 MWUs containing technical vocabulary were identified in the corpus. Most were two-word collocations (e.g., negative test, testing centre/s, and number of tests). Implications for identifying and dealing with technical vocabulary in both government communications and language education are discussed.