A Pragmatic Study of Argumentation in COVID-19 Healthcare Discourse

Abstract

The present study tackles pragmatically the concept of argumentation in COVID-19 advisory health infographics which have been designed by the World Health Organization (WHO) to increase public awareness towards the misconceptions which spread through the novel coronavirus disease crisis in 2020.Thus, the current work takes the following aims into the  consideration: (1) showing  the  pragmatic structure of argumentation in COVID-19 health infographics; (2) figuring out how speech acts and conversational maxims are utilized by writers in health infographics;(3)identifying the argumentation appeals and schemes which the writers  exploit in the selected  data. In relation  to the above mentioned aims, the following hypotheses are set: (1) speech act of  warning  is highly utilized  in the data under study;(2) the cooperative principles are highly observed in the selected health infographics; (3) logos and argument from consequences are the dominant argumentation strategies in the selected data. To fulfill the aims and to test the hypotheses, these procedures have been tackled:(1) developing an eclectic  model to analyze the pragmatic components of argumentation in the selected data;(2) adopting a qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze the data under study. The findings have rejected the first hypothesis and proved the second and third ones.