Suchergebnisse

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a real challenge to national and international authorities, bringing social and ideological implications. The shift from urgency to action and an appropriate message tailoring are essential in such a sanitary crisis. This article presents a multimodal critical discourse analysis of the Facebook posts of the Romanian Ministry of Health and of the online users' comments. The aim of the study is to examine how the Romanian authority and citizens use semiotic resources (multimodal texts) in order to give meaning and make meaning of the social practices related to the COVID 19 pandemic. The findings reveal that the Romanian authority mainly focused its messages on (de)legitimizing the actions of various abstract participants in an information campaign meant to counter fake news. The salience of behavioural processes-as instructions highlighted a reduced agency of the Ministry of Health and an increased agency for Romanian citizens. The online users employed polarization as a discursive strategy to legitimate the Romanian authority's calls-to-action that challenge the conservative liberalism ideology of the government and to delegitimate the tardiness of these actions.

The debate on genetically modified foods has been characterized by a heteroglosia of voices, ranging from experts, authorities, to scholars, community organizations, media, or consumers. Within such a context where there have been observed various food safety scares over the past decades or some public ignorance regarding the use of biotechnology related to food issues, the Debating Europe platform launched debates on arguments for and against GMOs. Thus citizens turn into prosumers of content regarding food safety and (de)legitimators of EU policies and/or other social institutions. In our study of the comments posted by e-citizens on four debates on GM foods launched on the Debating Europe platform, we will use framing theory (Goffman, 1974; Entman, 1993; Wynne, 2001; Cook et al., 2004) and the Integrated Crisis Mapping Model (Jin et al., 2012) for negative emotions and Plutchik's wheel of emotions (2001) for positive emotions to determine the salience of (de)legitimating frames employed by the supporters and opponents of GM foods, and to examine the role of affective stance in the evaluation of the social actors related to GMOs. Using QDA miner and WordStat, computer assisted qualitative data analysis softwares, we will conduct a content, cluster and correspondence analysis of the (de)legitimating frames and emotion valences. Whereas the content analysis provides an insight into the frequency of frames used by e-debaters and into the key lexical items that express evaluation and affective stance related to GM foods, the explorative analyses reveal the types of (sub)clusters which prevail in the e-debaters' comments on GM foods. The findings of this study suggest that e-citizens mainly perceive the issue of GMO through a political frame associated with anger and a health frame associated with fright.

Election campaigns become the most suitable spatio-temporal contexts where and when any (possible) President/ MP will implicitly or explicitly connect to some powerful mental images, adapted to the social and cultural embeddings. My paper focuses on the study of three election posters (fixed images) during the 2000 and 2004 election campaigns in Romania, having as their main protagonist Traian Basescu, the actual president of Romania. The reason for my choice lies in Basescu's attempt to break the monotony of empty words glued next to a mere collection of manly busts, through the use of some creative (non)verbal rhetorical devices which should be decoded by voters. My paper is based on two semiotic theories: - Theo van Leeuwen's social semiotics is the general framework against which the semiotic resources in the three election posters will be analysed. It also provides a "multimodal function of style" which includes a threefold process: writing, speaking and doing. I am of the opinion that the last functional component of style, namely, doing! acting upon allows a text producer to turn into a discursive master. - Umberto Eco's semiotic theory constitutes the theoretical background of my representing the discursive reinvention of political candidates as a semiotic circle (beginning point - example/ human being; ending point - stylization/ President) which will not be closed. The gap created between these two points suggests that any election stylization should be perceived as an appearance of reality. It was exactly this subtle game between reality and appearance which has driven me to place (conceptual) metaphors as the theoretical basis for the definition of a political discourse (political discourse = fortress). Traian B&sescu19 (and his team) created memorable election posters within these four years because they knew how to manipulate his social position in order to turn any slight hint of fake appearance into an ingredient of some real facts (B&sescu - the mayor of Bucharest, embodying the image of the mentor in 2000; Basescu - the possible president and a former merchant ship captain, embodying the image of the aggressive but justified punisher or the image of the social commander in 2004). The process of decoding the election posters was a subtle invitation for the Romanian reader to interpret every semiotic resources of technical nature (objects of value: a stake and a lollipop) or of physiological nature (hand gestures) through experiential abduction that will bring to surface associate connections stored in the memory of Romanian voters. B&sescu's new (non)verbal ways of designating a politician's involvement stops, in a way, the monotony of the inexpressiveness rendered by the vizualization of the political bust. The idiomatic expressions (a fi dus cu zaharelul = to believe in eye candy, a da (eapa = to give the shaft; to impale) coincide with the colloquial language style, the unpolished charisma and the sense of humor Traian Basescu is famous for.

With the growth of marketing's influence extending from the commercial domain into governance strategy, public health branding and promotional communication relating to the Covid-19 vaccine were essential for national authorities trying to transfer the WHO communication strategy and vaccine policies to their domestic contexts while maintaining public trust. This study explores the role of (de)legitimation in the Covid-19 vaccine communication (#ROVaccinare/ROVaccination) policy transfer and branding conducted by the Romanian government on Facebook. Adopting a top-down and bottom-up approach to the meaning-making process of the message strategy promotion, we employed a mixed-methods approach. We drew on categorizations of message tailoring related to health communication and operationalizations of discursive (de)legitimation. The main findings showed a preference for rationalization legitimation through the usage of fact-based posts and a clear integration of authorization and narrativization into the message strategy promotion of the ROVaccination page. However, despite the prevalence of fact-based posts, legitimation through personal and medical stories was a positive predictor of engagement, unlike legitimation through facts. The bottom-up approach revealed polarized attitudes towards healthcare professionals as sources of the campaign, the Romanian medical system, and past and present vaccination. The dominance of polarization in online users' comments emphasizes their role as agents of conversion, contesting either the message sources employed in the campaign or other commenters as personal authorities.

The dynamic structure of infographics implies users' interactivity and engagement. The 'Debating Europe' platform, launched in 2011 and focused on a 'bottom-up' approach, has been using infograhics in order "to illustrate key factors and to help explain complicated issues in an easily accessible way" (Debating Europe-Snapshot Report, 2014). Drawing on the infographics posted on the 'Debating Europe' platform, this study empirically explores the discourse-level of these visual images. We will consider infographics on European issues as visual-verbal texts that are socially constructed by the European Union to send its messages to EU citizens. Having social semiotics and appraisal theory as theoretical background, we will provide an insight into the potential navigation paths (information values, salience and framing) beyond these European infographics and into the use of the visual and verbal semiotic resources in the infographics on European issues.