Phraseology and imagery in UK public health agency COVID-19 tweets

Oakey, David ORCID: 0000-0001-7936-8315, Jones, Christian ORCID: 0000-0003-0407-8860 and O’Halloran, Kay L (2022) Phraseology and imagery in UK public health agency COVID-19 tweets In: Discourses, Modes, Media and Meaning in an Era of Pandemic. Taylor & Francis, London, pp. 89-114. ISBN 978- 0- 367- 76707- 5

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Summary

This chapter examines linguistic and visual communication in UK public health agency tweets as part of a wider project looking at the effectiveness of public health information about COVID-19 for speakers of English as an additional language (EAL). In this study, we use corpus linguistics and multimodal social semiotic analysis to examine the phraseology and imagery of UK public health agency tweets to understand how linguistic and visual representations combine to shape these messages. Results show that in terms of form, four-word n-grams in this data often overlapped each other or served as part of frames for longer messages. In terms of functions, the n-grams often served to give advice or instructions while presenting this more neutrally as information. Hence the message was often conveyed via implicature rather than directly expressing the intended information and directives. Results also show that the images that were combined with these frequent n-grams tended to be photographs representing members of the public and authority figures, procedural infographics and posters with cartoon images. The text in the tweets appeared at times misaligned with the intended functions of these visual representations, thus affecting the overall effectiveness of the public health communications.

Item Type:	Chapter
Uncontrolled Keywords:	46 Information and Computing Sciences, 47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4704 Linguistics, Coronaviruses, Health Services, Clinical Research
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	20 Oct 2022 10:47
Last Modified:	22 May 2026 16:37
DOI:	10.4324/9781003168195-8
Open Access URL:	https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003168195
Related Websites:	Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3164944
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