How has the Nation Been Coping? A Corpus Analysis of Malaysian Letters to the Editor in Another COVID-19 Community-Wide Containment
Abstract
With the development of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen a rise in digitalisation that includes receiving and/or reading information online. There is a wealth of citizen journalism such as letters to editors that are garnering wider readability based on availability of news offered online as well as netizens’ independence to search for more credible sources on the web. The present study aims to examine a corpus of Malaysian online letters to editors that reflect public expressions of the second community-wide containment, also known as the Movement Control Order (MCO2.0) in the country. Following the corpus linguistics approach, frequency word lists are firstly extracted from public online letters in a popular national newspaper, which are further investigated in terms of collocational analysis and close inspection of words and phrases that are used in context via concordancing. This analysis is comparable to highlighting any similarities or differences expressed among Malaysians in a previous study conducted during the first MCO. Findings showed that letters during MCO2.0 were more about COVID-19 vaccines compared to the crisis and restricted movements in the first MCO. In-depth speech acts analysis, according to Searle (1979), revealed that discussions related to vaccination are mostly in favour of the government’s plan in making vaccines free and accessible regardless of citizenship.
Keywords: Citizen journalism; corpus-based studies; COVID-19; Lancsbox 5.0; speech acts
Full Text:
PDFReferences
Al-Hindawi, F. H. & Ali, A. H. (2018). A pragmatic study of CNN and BBC news headlines covering the Syrian conflict. Advances in Language and Literary Studies, 9(3), 43-51.
Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford University Press.
Aziz, F. M. A. (2020). Blame attribution versus responsibility assignment in the metaphors of health reporting: A case study of COVID 19. International Journal of
Innovation, Creativity and Change, 14(8), 480-492.
Baker, P. (2016). The shapes of collocation. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 21(2), 139-164.
Brezina, V. (2018). Collocation graphs and networks: Selected applications. In P. Cantos-Gómez & M. Almela-Sánchez (Eds.), Lexical collocation analysis advances
and applications (pp. 59-83). Springer.
Brezina, V., Weill-Tessier, P., & McEnery, A. (2020). #LancsBox v. 5.x. [software]. http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/lancsbox
Cappuzzo, B. (2020). Anglicisms and Italian equivalents in the era of Covid-19: A corpus-based study of lockdown. European Scientific Journal, 16(38), 7-26.
Carvalho, M. (2021). Vaccination to begin Feb 24. The Star. https://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2021/02/22/vaccination-to-begin-feb-24
Culpeper, J. (2009). Keyness: Words, parts-of-speech and semantic categories in the character-talk of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. International Journal of
Corpus Linguistics, 14(1), 29-59.
Ganasegeran, K., Ch'ng, A., & Looi, I. (2020). COVID-19 in Malaysia: Crucial measures in critical times. Journal of Global Health, 10(2), 1-4.
Hall, J. (2008). Online editions: Newspapers and the ‘new’ news. In B. Franklin (Ed.), Pulling Newspapers Apart: Analysing Print Journalism (pp. 204-211). Routledge.
Hayek, L., Mayrl, M., & Russmann, U. (2020). The citizen as contributor - Letters to the editor in the Austrian tabloid paper Kronen Zeitung (2008-2017). Journalism
Studies, Vol. 21(8), 1127-1145.
Hootsuite and We Are Social. (2020). Digital 2021: Malaysia. Data Reportal. https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2021-malaysia
Joharry, S. A. & S. Turiman. (2020). Collocation networks and Covid-19 in letters to the editor: A Malaysian case study. Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research, 1(1),
-30.
Katermina, V., & Yachenko, E. (2020). Axiology of COVID-19 as a linguistic phenomenon in English mass media discourse. Advances in Journalism and
Communication, 8, 59-67.
Kim, Y. (2020). On media coverage of the COVID-19 outbreak: A corpus-based collocation study. SNU Working Papers in English Linguistics and Language, 17, 47-73.
Leo, A. R., & David, M. K. (2020). A critical metaphor analysis on Malaysia’s gazetted metaphors amid the Movement Control Order: A COVID-19 episode. Journal of
Humanities and Social Sciences Research, 2(S), 193-204.
McNair, B. (2008). I, columnist. In Franklin, B. (Ed.), Pulling newspapers apart: Analysing print journalism (pp. 106-114). Routledge.
Mutsvairo, B., & Salgado, S. (2020). Is citizen journalism dead? An examination of recent developments in the field. Journalism, 1-18.
Nordquist, R. (2020). Speech Act Theory. ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/speech-act-theory-1691986
Prastio, B., Ibrahim, A. S., Susanto, G. & Nurzafira, I. (2021). Pattern of indirect directive speech acts on online advertisements. Jurnal Bahasa, Sastra, Seni, dan
Pengajarannya, 49(2), 152–166.
Rajendran, K. (2020). A long battle ahead’: Malaysian and Singaporean Prime Ministers employ war metaphors for COVID-19. GEMA Online® Journal of Language
Studies, 20(3), 261-267.
Roberts, J. (2019). Citizen Journalism. In R. Hobbs & P. Mihailidis (Eds.), The International Encyclopedia of Media Literacy (pp. 1-10). John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Shah, A., Safri, S., Thevadas, R., Noordin, N., Rahman, A., Sekawi, Z., Ideris, A., & Sultan, M. (2020). COVID-19 outbreak in Malaysia: Actions taken by the
Malaysian government. Int J Infect Dis, 97, 108-116.
Semino, E. (2020). “Not Soldiers but Fire-fighters”–Metaphors and Covid-19. Health Communication, 36(1), 50-58.
Searle, J. R. (1979). Expression and meaning: Studies in the theory of speech acts. Cambridge University Press.
Sušinskienė, S. (2010). Nominalization as a cohesive device in British newspaper editorials. FILOLOGIJA 2010(15), 142-150.
van Dijck, J., & Alinejad, D. (2020). Social media and trust in scientific expertise: Debating the Covid-19 pandemic in the Netherlands. Social Media + Society
October-December 2020, 1–11
Wahl-Jorgensen, K. (2008). Op-ed pages. In Franklin, B. (Ed.), Pulling newspapers apart: Analysing print journalism (pp. 67-74). Routledge.
Wicke, P., & Bolognesi, M. M. (2020). Framing COVID-19: How we conceptualize and discuss the pandemic on Twitter. PLoS ONE, 15(9), 1-24.
Wilding, D., Fray, P., Molitorisz, S. & McKewon, E. (2018). The impact of digital platforms on news and journalistic content. University Technology Sydney.
Williams, G. (2001). Mediating between lexis and texts: Collocational networks in specialised corpora. Asp, la revue du GERAS, 31, 63-76.
World Health Organisation. (2021). Coronavirus disease (COVID-19): Vaccines. https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/coronavirus-disease-(covid-19)-vaccines
Yu, H., Lu, H., & Hu, J. (2021). A corpus-based critical discourse analysis of news reports on the COVID-19 pandemic in China and the UK. International Journal of
English Linguistics, 11(2), 36-45.
Yule, G. (1996). Pragmatics: Oxford introduction to language study ELT. Oxford University Press.
Zheni, T. (2020). Speech acts and hegemony in discourse: Donald Trump's tweets on the US-Iranian nuclear crisis. International Journal of Language and Literary
Studies, 2(4), 215-235.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17576/3L-2021-2704-04
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
eISSN : 2550-2247
ISSN : 0128-5157