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Part of
Remedies against the Pandemic: How politicians communicate crisis management
Edited by Nadine Thielemann and Daniel Weiss
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 102] 2023
► pp. 44–74

Political speeches as a tool
of Covid19 crisis management?

Discursive and linguistic localization of the crisis in Central Europe and Western Balkans

| Friedrich Schiller University
| University of Regensburg

This study focuses on crisis communication in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Serbia, and North Macedonia during the first, second, and third pandemic waves and takes a comparative pragmatics approach. By focusing on pragmatic features, such as speech acts and discursive/linguistic aspects of communicated values, we examine how the Covid19 crisis management is realized on the linguistic micro-level in political speeches as a salient genre of political discourse. Our study shows that the most distinct benefit of political speeches compared to other tools of crisis communication is that they forge transindividual identity, a sense of community, and highlight desired social values. In contrast, political speeches can block effective crisis communication when they exhibit high levels of intertextuality, are saturated with information, and over-aggregation.

Keywords: political speeches, pragmatics, speech acts, values, crisis communication, Covid19, Central Europe, Western Balkans
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Crisis leadership and crisis communication
  • 3.Government communication in pandemic times
    • 3.1Political speeches
  • 4.Method and material
    • 4.1Method
    • 4.2Material and contextual background
      • 4.2.1The Czech Republic and Slovakia
      • 4.2.2Serbia and North Macedonia
  • 5.Analysis
    • 5.1The Czech Republic and Slovakia
    • 5.2Serbia and North Macedonia
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 24 July 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.102.02ber
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