Finnish and French public signs from commercial premises during the Covid-19 pandemic

Bibliographic Data

ID21200923
AuthorsJohanna Isosävi (0000-0003-2327-9799, University of Helsinki, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume14
Issue2
Pages306-333
Publication date2023-07-06
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePragmatics and Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1878-9714 • E-ISSN: 1878-9722
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/ps.22012.iso
OpenAlexW4383342903
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited26

This paper studies 200 signs displayed in commercial premises during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in Finland and in France. The data were collected through crowdsourcing via social media platforms and analysed from the perspective of cross-cultural pragmatics. The vast majority of Finnish and French directives were direct, but cross-cultural differences emerged in relation to perspective and mitigation. Specifically, French signs preferred an impersonal perspective, whereas Finnish signs favoured a hearer perspective, and Finnish signs were more often mitigated than French signs. The signs balanced between attracting customers and imposing safety measures on them through the justification of measures, the presentation of measures taken by businesses themselves, as well as by addressing clients and thanking them. The findings suggest that the directives in Covid-19 signs differ from directives in other data types

2019-20 coronavirus outbreak · Business · Crowdsourcing · Linguistics · Pandemic · Political science · Pragmatics · Public relations · Sociology · Computer Science · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Law · Linguistics and Discourse Analysis · Medicine · Psychology · Virology

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