A multimodal discourse approach to the construction/expression of national identity in political leaders’ televised statements at the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

The health crisis originating from the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 forced political leaders to adopt common unprecedented measures all around the world (e.g. social distancing and lockdown). Despite the global dimension of the problem, responses were managed and communicated locally, as political leaders made televised official statements to inform all the people in the countries they represented. A few studies have already highlighted salient features of such statements, e.g. the use of war metaphors and other rhetorical devices to gain legitimacy, credibility, and authority. The present study took a multimodal approach to the first pandemic-related televised statements by five leaders (representatives of France, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the USA) to look for evidence of national and political identity construction/expression on a visual and verbal level. Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis and Pragmatics, a comparative analysis was carried out to highlight possible un/shared patterns emerging from different semiotic layers: the settings in which these first statements were made, speakers’ nonverbal communication (paralanguage and kinesics) and verbal communication. By using lexicometric tools, it was possible to consider systematically all the occurrences of verbal resources such as deixis, which plays a fundamental role in establishing a link between text and context. In this particular case, the focus was on the opposition between the different referents designated by relevant personal pronouns, i.e. the leaders, their government, their Nations and People, and the virus. While all the leaders appear to share a number of communicative features typical of solemn, political public declarations, they also display marked differences in the ways they construct and express their national and political ethos.