Stances on the Xylella Fastidiosa Bacterium and the Coronavirus in the Public Discourse

The paper deals with the stances on the Xylella fastidiosa (Xf) bacterium and the coronavirus in the public discourse. Relying on Hyland’s stance model (2005), we seek to identify the linguistic devices (hedges, boosters, attitude markers and selfmentions), used in both contexts, which helped the authors express their opinions. The corpus comprises articles on Xf and the coronavirus collected from the internet sources in English. The findings indicate that the most frequent stance markers in both subcorpora include hedges and boosters. There are slight differences in the marker frequencies, depending on the disease in question. The conclusion discusses the role of stance markers in impacting attitudes while reporting on these two important issues and their use in communicating tentativeness or certainty

Bacteria · Biology · Coronavirus · Disease · Pathology · Xylella fastidiosa · Communication · Infectious Diseases and Mycology · Medicine · Psychology · Genetics · Virology