Università degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia

Misinformation, disinformation, and fake news are available across diverse media, causing distrust in governmental and health institutions. In this context, the use of language has been of great interest in research, specifically in health communication, on social media, and in traditional news media. Our aim is to analyse and compare how the successive doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been presented in different forms of knowledge communication, namely scientific research papers and the media, including online magazines and newspaper articles. By focusing on frequency, collocates, and phraseology of booster and dose, we trace differences in how boosters are presented in both lay and professional contexts of communication. Scientific discourse shows a marked preference for the more neutral and cautious term dose, which is also associated with the description of administration procedures. News discourse is characterised both by a higher incidence of the word booster (implying a reinforcement of an already existing immunity) and by the choice of referring to the institutional voices recommending vaccines. Results shed light on how different discourses manifest their perceived functions through lexical choice, as well as how news discourse uses and reinterprets scientific discourse in the light of what is relevant to the audience.

This paper explores how transportation companies across Europe, North America, and Asia have tackled inclusion and the diversity of their employees in their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports over the last five years. By means of a small diachronic corpus of the CSR reports of nine transportation and logistics companies from 2015 to 2020, this corpus-based analysis examines the minutiae of the language of inclusion that has been adopted. The diachronic analysis of the CSR reports explores changes, if any, in the inclusion of employees across the timespan under consideration. Similarities and differences across cultures will shed light on both changes and new paths that transportation companies have adopted in terms of communication as well as the self-presentation of their image according to stakeholders, potential employees and the public in general.

This paper looks at cross-cultural variation in corporate communication over the pandemic, focusing on the language adopted by rail companies in the UK and Italy to enhance trust in safety and highlighting how they engage in communicative action with potential passengers and other online users. The analysis shows that UK companies generally prefer personal forms of self-mention and avoid technicisms, while Italian companies adopt more formal language and more impersonal forms of self-representation. Common elements seem to be related to repeated communicative functions, and the semantic elements they involve, thus highlighting the close link between pragmatic units and lexico-grammatical patterns (with their semantics), as well as the interplay between meaning, dialogic action and context in communication.

Over the last decades Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR, Dahlsrud 2008) has become a sine qua non in the corporate world and a central plank of corporate communication. Firms have been increasingly called upon to behave responsibly and disclose information about their ethical values and performance. In particular, the recent events of the Covid-19 pandemic and the renewed upsurge of social movements in the late 2010s, such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, have brought attention to the question of inequality and, for that matter, to equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI). As such, companies have started not simply to intensify their engagement in Corporate Social Responsibility, but also to (re)consider and communicate their stance on these social issues. In the literature, great attention has been paid to EDI in the workforce from a management perspective. In detail, while equality assumes that all people should be offered equal opportunities irrespective of their race, gender and disability, diversity entails the recognition of the value of differences (e.g. age, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, education, religious beliefs to name but a few), and inclusion is concerned with the processes that support employees’ participation, empowerment and contribution in organizations (Oswick and Noon 2014). Nevertheless, although EDI has been widely explored in the management field, limited research has been conducted on how companies linguistically, discursively and (non-)transparently construct these issues in corporate disclosures.  In the current context of growing distrust towards businesses and their CSR practices, transparency has become a key priority for companies as it allows them to maintain their legitimacy to operate and build stakeholders’ trust. Following Stacks et al. (2013, 570), “Stakeholders ascribe strong reputation to the organization when it is transparent in the conduct of its affairs. On the contrary, if the organization avoids communication with stakeholders or provides only minimal, incomplete, or untruthful information to stakeholders, it loses ground in the court of public opinion (Fombrun and van Riel, 2004)”. In view of these considerations, the present study focuses on transportation: a particular industry sector in which public perceptions of transparency need to be carefully managed and maintained. Specifically, we aim to investigate whether and if so how, equality, diversity and inclusion are transparently framed in the CSR reports belonging to a selection of rail companies operating in three different geographical areas across the world: Europe, North America and Asia. More to the point, we will take into account the case study of three rail companies headquartered in three different countries, namely Deutsche Bahn in Germany, Amtrak in the USA, and West Japan Rail Company in Japan. Furthermore, in an effort to explore the language constructions of EDI not only in their variation across countries but also as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic, the analysis examines a sample of CSR, Sustainability or Integrated Reports that were disclosed in 2018 (pre-Covid-19) and 2022 (post-Covid-19). More specifically, we considered specific sections describing People and Employees (e.g. “Human Resources”, “Our People”, and “Social”). In the first stage of the study, transparency is examined along three dimensions: disclosure, i.e. amount, completeness and relevance of information; clarity or understandability of information; and accuracy, i.e. information reliability (Schnackenberg and Tomlinson 2016). The sections of the CSR reports covering EDI topics are explored with the support of corpus linguistics tools (such as word frequencies, concordances and keywords) to identify frequent lexico-grammatical patterns, and qualitatively through discourse analysis, to verify whether the information provided by the com

The present study explores new meanings and values of the word slow in the context of Slow Art Day, a global event that takes place once a year and whose aim is to encourage both visitors and museum curators to engage with art in new and different ways. Since 1989 and the early days of Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food Movement, the concept of slowness has become a relevant and ethical topic that is often related to what is organic, local and sustainable. While the notion and impact of slowness have been studied in different areas such as food (Petrini 2003), media (Rauch 2011), medicine (Wear et al. 2015) and education (O’Neill 2014), museums are yet to be investigated in depth. Through the lens of Appraisal Theory (Martin, White 2005) and corpus linguistics (Sinclair 2004), I focus on a diachronic study of the language of evaluation adopted in the Slow Art Day official blog, which keeps a record of the reports of the museums that take part in the yearly event. By using both a quantitative and qualitative approach, I focus on how appraisal is used to enhance and promote the new and different semantic dimensions related to slowness. My analysis of the Slow Art Day blog will illustrate how slowness is no longer related to the semantic dimension of Time, but also to those of Wellbeing and Inclusiveness, while a close study of evaluative language will show how these dimensions are interconnected to one another.

This paper looks at dialogicity in the Slow Art Day blog and focuses on the way the representation of participants encodes the complexity of the communicative action through a polyphony of textual voices. By focusing on posts from the pandemic years (2020 and 2021), and contrasting them with the previous period, we carry out a collocation analysis and a study of semantic preferences (Sinclair 2004) to explore how writers present themselves and how they interact with the reader and other textual voices in a context of cultural intermediation. By looking at forms of address and of self-mention, we trace how this blog enacts different forms of dialogic action with its readers and stakeholders in the extended situational context.

Communicating risk during the Covid-19 pandemic Since the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak, media content has focused on issues related to the virus, ranging from scientific and medical information (i.e. structure of the virus, effects, vaccines, etc.) to safety measures and government restrictions (i.e. lockdown, curfews, use of masks, etc.). Covid-19 discourse has raised much interest in academia, both in linguistics and the social sciences especially concerning the frequently used metaphor of war (Sabucedo et al 2020, Wagener 2020, Castro Seixas 2021, Panzeri et al. 2021, Taylor 2021). Other studies have focused on the communication of risk during Covid-19 from a health perspective to address eventual gaps in the interaction between doctors and virologists and patients and non-experts (Abrams and Greenhawt 2020, Chesser et al. 2020). However, to our knowledge risk is yet to be studied from a linguistic perspective. The aim of this paper is to analyse how risk was conveyed in newspapers and on online magazines during 2020. More specifically, we present a diachronic analysis of the words risk and threat in the Coronavirus Corpus which was created to keep record of the economic, social and political impact of the pandemic. By tracing changes (if there are any) in frequency and meaning over the months, we aim at identifying collocates and phraseology used to convey issues related to risk and virus menace since the start of the outbreak. Results will shed light on the communication of risk and on significant patterns associated to the semantic field of threat during a health emergency.

How do companies that produce highly diverse merchandise promote their different goods and how do they target them to their consumers? The Husqvarna brand is known for containing several divisions that manufacture a wide range of products from motorbikes to chainsaws and sewing machines. Each of these companies has its own dedicated webpage, which represents an important space for self-promotion and presentation of the characteristics of their products. However, while Husqvarna has been widely studied in terms of marketing and corporate social responsibility, whether the brand’s promotional strategies relative to the diverse products are more or less the same or change accordingly remains to be investigated. The present study sets out to fill this gap by examining how motorbikes and sewing machines are described and promoted on the respective Husqvarna websites by looking at branding, targeting, and promotional language. In order to carry out our analysis, we created two corpora from the official US Husqvarna Motorcycles and Sewing Machines websites. The two corpora have been analysed following both a quantitative and qualitative approach, combining corpus linguistics and appraisal theory (Martin and White 2005). This case study will yield insights on how multidivisional companies promote their different products and how they target them for their different audiences.