SPECIAL ISSUE
DISCOURSES ON COVID-19: SPECIAL ISSUE OF RESEARCH IN PRAGMATICS
Call for Papers
The corona virus disease broke out in December of 2019 from the city of Wuhan in the People’s Republic of China. The pandemic suddenly became an awful global experience, and as at March 2020, it has spread to almost all countries of the world. The outbreak of the pandemic and the multifarious governmental and multi-sectoral responses to its contagion have eventuated the emergence of unique discourses in its communication in the media. These discourses are fertile grounds for the emergence of new language ideologies, such as those that construct identities, ideas, speculations, and ‘conspiracy theories’surrounding the pandemic. The WAR against the contagion is as crucial as tackling the WORD WAR on the virus. Obvious cases of disinformation, fake news, hate speeches and malicious fabrications are beginning to attract global scholarly attention. Indeed, these unique communicative features of COVID-19 discourses, call for critical pragmatic and discourse interventions by way of providing linguistic analyses and understandings of the communication of COVID-19 in the conventional media, social media and other platforms of communication.
A special issue of Research in Pragmatics entitled: DISCOURSES ON COVID-19, therefore, calls for scholarly contributions to address the various linguistic dimensions to the understanding and demystification of the pandemic, with data drawn across the globe and analysed from different scholarly ambits of language use ranging from pragmatics, discourse analysis, literary studies, philosophy, religion and other sister disciplines within humanistic scholarship. Submissions for the Special Edition are expected from, but not limited to, the areas highlighted below which are expected to be interrogated from the ambits of pragmatics and discourse analysis.
Sub-themes
- The pragmatics of language use in the discourses on COVID-19
- Ideology and identity construction of actions and actors in the discourses on COVID-19
- Language and worldview in the discourses on COVID-19
- Multimodality (cartoons, pictures and images) and the communication of COVID-19
- Religion and religiosity in the discourses on COVID-I9
- African Philosophy and thoughts on the outbreak
- Nigerian philosophy, tradition and attitude during the outbreak
- Nigeria and the rest of the world during the outbreak of COVID-19
- The role of media and communication during the outbreak.
Only data-driven articles which are not under consideration in any other journal or book project are welcome. All submissions will be subjected to a blind peer-reviewing process and should be between 5,000 and 7,000 words with an abstract of 200-250 words. All articles should follow the APA referencing style. Interested contributors should forward their papers to covid19spec@pragmaticsng.org. The deadline for submission is August 30, 2020. Authors of accepted papers will be contacted before the end of September and the special issue will be published in June of 2021. Enquiries should be directed to the guest editors.
Guest Editors
Gbenga Ibileye, PhD. gbengaibileye@yahoo.com or 08065658777
Victoria Faleke, PhD. falekevictoria@yahoo.com or 09096806154
Ganiu Bamgbose, PhD. ganibamgbose@gmail.com or 08093695359