This talk, given by Benet Vincent and Sheena Gardner, was based on a paper (written with David Beauchamp) which they recently submitted to the volume Applying Systemic Functional Linguistics to Meet the Challenge of Change, edited by Vinh To, Eric Cheung and Jonathan Webster.
In the talk, Benet and Sheena discussed their research into the way instructions were delivered in the daily televised Downing Street briefings during the first Covid-19 lockdown in March-June 2020. This involved collecting and then analysing a 120,000-word corpus of the 95 UK Government Briefings spanning the lockdown for all instances of instructions addressed to the public. The instructions were analysed in terms of the actions the public were most commonly instructed to perform, with a focus on the 3 most common instructions, stay at home, social distance and follow the rules.
The analysis examines the realisations of these three instructions and how they varied over this period, showing the extent to which government spokespeople presented compliance with these instructions as open to negotiation and revealing some lack of consistency in the messaging.