{"title":"Kindness in British communities: Discursive practices of promoting kindness during the Covid pandemic.","authors":"Jilan Wei","doi":"10.1177/09579265221148691","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This research adopts Critical Discourse Analysis as a perspective to explore how kindness was expressed and promoted in university communities and city communities from January to March in 2020 when the Covid pandemic broke out in the UK and provide a window on British culture in which kindness was expressed and promoted through discourse. It combines a qualitative method with a corpus-based quantitative method. It is found that kindness was meant for providing support and showing compassion and inclusion to community members and that strategies in lexis, syntax and metaphor can reproduce or resist the expression and promotion of kindness in communities. During the pandemic, the intentional kindness expressed by community authorities was respect of diversity rather than inclusion of different values or ethnicity and no substantial support was provided to vulnerable members even though authorities were trying to impress the public by claiming that they were making constant efforts to support the community. Case studies revealed that we should caution against the use of passivation and the pronouns like <i>they</i>.</p>","PeriodicalId":47965,"journal":{"name":"Discourse & Society","volume":"34 4","pages":"502-520"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4000,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9834622/pdf/","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Discourse & Society","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265221148691","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2023/1/10 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"COMMUNICATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
Abstract
This research adopts Critical Discourse Analysis as a perspective to explore how kindness was expressed and promoted in university communities and city communities from January to March in 2020 when the Covid pandemic broke out in the UK and provide a window on British culture in which kindness was expressed and promoted through discourse. It combines a qualitative method with a corpus-based quantitative method. It is found that kindness was meant for providing support and showing compassion and inclusion to community members and that strategies in lexis, syntax and metaphor can reproduce or resist the expression and promotion of kindness in communities. During the pandemic, the intentional kindness expressed by community authorities was respect of diversity rather than inclusion of different values or ethnicity and no substantial support was provided to vulnerable members even though authorities were trying to impress the public by claiming that they were making constant efforts to support the community. Case studies revealed that we should caution against the use of passivation and the pronouns like they.
期刊介绍:
Discourse & Society is a multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal whose major aim is to publish outstanding research at the boundaries of discourse analysis and the social sciences. It focuses on explicit theory formation and analysis of the relationships between the structures of text, talk, language use, verbal interaction or communication, on the one hand, and societal, political or cultural micro- and macrostructures and cognitive social representations, on the other hand. That is, D&S studies society through discourse and discourse through an analysis of its socio-political and cultural functions or implications. Its contributions are based on advanced theory formation and methodologies of several disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.