COVID-19-Related FAQs as a Form of Online Institutional Communication: An Exploratory Study

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected everyone’s life, and COVID-19 prevention and control measures have altered everyone’s daily routine. Such measures have been put in place through legislative and regulatory acts, whose typical linguistic features make them not always accessible to the population th...

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Main Author: Katia Peruzzo
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: LED - Edizioni Universitarie di Lettere Economia Diritto 2023-01-01
Series:Lingue Culture Mediazioni
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.ledonline.it/index.php/LCM-Journal/article/view/2958
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author Katia Peruzzo
author_facet Katia Peruzzo
author_sort Katia Peruzzo
collection DOAJ
description The COVID-19 pandemic has affected everyone’s life, and COVID-19 prevention and control measures have altered everyone’s daily routine. Such measures have been put in place through legislative and regulatory acts, whose typical linguistic features make them not always accessible to the population they apply to. Therefore, other forms of communication have been used as a form of mediation, for instance by institutions and news media outlets, to share information on and thus facilitate the implementation of such measures among the population. This paper presents an exploratory micro-analysis of an English and an Italian webpage containing frequently asked questions (FAQs), a web genre often used for knowledge dissemination but still scarcely investigated from a linguistic perspective. The aim of the FAQs examined is to explain the provisions adopted to tackle the second wave of the pandemic (the two webpages were available online in September 2020) to a non-specialised and non-better specified audience. After briefly discussing the content distribution, the study adopts a conversation analysis perspective to identify the type of questions used and the (lack of ) question-conditioned relevance in adjacency pairs.
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spelling doaj.art-6a0284ee367b4895a6fb0a92937378b92023-01-30T10:41:51ZengLED - Edizioni Universitarie di Lettere Economia DirittoLingue Culture Mediazioni2284-18812421-02932023-01-0192618010.7358/lcm-2022-002-kper1682COVID-19-Related FAQs as a Form of Online Institutional Communication: An Exploratory StudyKatia Peruzzo0University of TriesteThe COVID-19 pandemic has affected everyone’s life, and COVID-19 prevention and control measures have altered everyone’s daily routine. Such measures have been put in place through legislative and regulatory acts, whose typical linguistic features make them not always accessible to the population they apply to. Therefore, other forms of communication have been used as a form of mediation, for instance by institutions and news media outlets, to share information on and thus facilitate the implementation of such measures among the population. This paper presents an exploratory micro-analysis of an English and an Italian webpage containing frequently asked questions (FAQs), a web genre often used for knowledge dissemination but still scarcely investigated from a linguistic perspective. The aim of the FAQs examined is to explain the provisions adopted to tackle the second wave of the pandemic (the two webpages were available online in September 2020) to a non-specialised and non-better specified audience. After briefly discussing the content distribution, the study adopts a conversation analysis perspective to identify the type of questions used and the (lack of ) question-conditioned relevance in adjacency pairs.https://www.ledonline.it/index.php/LCM-Journal/article/view/2958adjacent pairsconversation analysisfaqsinstitutional communicationquestion-conditioned relevance
spellingShingle Katia Peruzzo
COVID-19-Related FAQs as a Form of Online Institutional Communication: An Exploratory Study
Lingue Culture Mediazioni
adjacent pairs
conversation analysis
faqs
institutional communication
question-conditioned relevance
title COVID-19-Related FAQs as a Form of Online Institutional Communication: An Exploratory Study
title_full COVID-19-Related FAQs as a Form of Online Institutional Communication: An Exploratory Study
title_fullStr COVID-19-Related FAQs as a Form of Online Institutional Communication: An Exploratory Study
title_full_unstemmed COVID-19-Related FAQs as a Form of Online Institutional Communication: An Exploratory Study
title_short COVID-19-Related FAQs as a Form of Online Institutional Communication: An Exploratory Study
title_sort covid 19 related faqs as a form of online institutional communication an exploratory study
topic adjacent pairs
conversation analysis
faqs
institutional communication
question-conditioned relevance
url https://www.ledonline.it/index.php/LCM-Journal/article/view/2958
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