Page 200 - The International Journal of the Royal Society of Thailand Vol.XIII-2021

The International Journal of the Royal Society of Thailand
Volume XIII – 2021

results, and discussion, though with somewhat different labels across scholars.
Moreover, these functions can be accomplished by certain linguistic features

(Hyland & Tse, 2005; Kanoksilapatham, 2013). Therefore, considering the volume
of written discourse about COVID-19 available to the general public, this study
aims to 1) examine what communicative functions that potentially shape,

construct, or determine the prevailing COVID-19 language use, and 2) identify
linguistic features that help accomplish the functions.

Procedures and dataset

This study is qualitative in nature and adopts the corpus-driven approach, a

methodology in which the corpus serves as an empirical foundation, and data and
linguistic phenomena are extracted or recognized without prior assumptions and
expectations (Tognini-Bonelli 2001). As for compiling the corpus for this study,
there are four requirements. First, only COVID-19-related discourse was considered.

Next, all language samples to be analyzed in this study were available online. It is
known that the messages delivered to different groups of individuals can differ
drastically. For example, medical discourse for experts and specialists can be dense
with medical jargon terminology. Therefore, the messages specifically delivered to

the general public were included in the corpus of this study. Finally, due to the
dynamic nature of the pandemic, which could have an impact on language use,
these online language samples were compiled over a three-month period from
June 1 to August 31, 2021. As suggested, a number of variables that could have

influenced the analysis results, such as the length of the language samples, stylistic
variation, and the individuals who posted them, were not taken into account in this
study’s analysis. However, all of the language samples examined in this study had
two things in common – they were both authentic and meant for the general

public. Therefore, it is interesting to examine how these COVID-19 messages were
crafted and what linguistic features were employed to reach a general audience.

The dataset as described above was thus loosely structured, consisting of
three subsets of language samples. The first subset consists of 90 scripts available
online both in Thai and English from the daily reports prepared by Thailand’s

Center for COVID-19 Situation Administration to disseminate, and keep the public

190 COVID-19 Impact Manifestation as Seen through the Lens of Language Use