APPENDIX to "Communicating the unknown. An interdisciplinary annotation study of uncertainty in the coronavirus pandemic"

The study 'Communicating the unknown' draws on an annotation approach to examine uncertainty in British and German newspaper articles on the coronavirus pandemic. We developed a tagset in an interdisciplinary team from corpus linguistics and sociology. After working out a gold standard on a pilot corpus, we apply the annotation to the entire corpus drawing on an “annotation-by-query” approach in CQPWeb, based on uncertainty constructions that have been extracted from the gold standard data. The annotated data are then evaluated and sociologically contextualised. On this basis, we study the development of uncertainty markers in the period under study and compare media discourses in Germany and the UK. We document here the CQL queries which we used to measure uncertainty in our corpora.

本研究题为《传递未知》（Communicating the unknown），依托标注方法考察英德两国报纸关于新冠疫情报道中的不确定性表述。我们联合语料库语言学与社会学跨学科团队，构建了一套标注集（tagset）。在试点语料库上确立金标准（gold standard）后，我们基于从金标准数据中提取的不确定性构式（uncertainty constructions），借助CQPWeb平台的查询式标注（annotation-by-query）方法，将标注方案应用于全部语料库。随后对标注完成的数据开展评估，并从社会学维度进行语境化解读。在此基础上，我们分析研究时段内不确定性标记（uncertainty markers）的演变态势，并对比德国与英国的媒体话语。本文在此附上我们用于量化语料库中不确定性表述的CQL查询语句。