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Part of
Science Communication on the Internet: Old genres meet new genres
Edited by María José Luzón and Carmen Pérez-Llantada
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 308] 2019
► pp. 173–194

Chapter 9
#Vaccineswork

Recontextualizing the content of epidemiology reports on Twitter

This study examines the ways in which information originating in epidemiological reports is recontextualized in the @ECDC_VPD account, the Twitter account of a European health agency. Using a corpus-assisted discourse analytical approach complemented with multimodal analysis, this study compares the strategies used to achieve proximity (Hyland 2010) in the space-constrained genre of Twitter with those used in the source texts. The study finds that the macro-structural properties of the @ECDC_VPD tweets have become more complex over time and the use of images to enhance meaning-making has increased. The drive to present claims as newsworthy, coupled with the 140/280-character constraint, results in the tweets containing greater relative use of stance markers and lower use of epistemic modals than is observed in the source texts. The @ECDC_VPD tweets display a greater range of engagement strategies than is seen in the source texts.

Keywords: digital genres, popularization, recontextualization, Twitter, health communication
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Exploiting proximity resources in traditional and digital genres
    • 2.1Proximity resources
    • 2.2Organization, argument and credibility
    • 2.3Stance and engagement
  • 3.Research questions
  • 4.Data and method
    • 4.1Data and corpus compilation
    • 4.2Method
  • 5.Results and discussion
    • 5.1Credibility
    • 5.2Organization and argument
    • 5.3Stance and engagement
      • 5.3.1The ECDC reports corpus
      • 5.3.2The @ECDC_VPD corpus
  • 6.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 4 December 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.308.09orp
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