Frames Featuring in Epidemiological Crisis Communication. A Frame-Semantic Analysis of Pandemic Crisis Communication in Multilingual Belgium

To date, frame-semantic theory has been applied to various domain-specific discourses, such as legal, economic, and even oenological discourses. Yet, epidemiological crisis communications form a domain-specific discourse tradition which has been left untouched by frame-semanticists. As such, we will conduct a descriptive pilot study which will consider some of the frames present in these texts. To this end, we collected a pilot corpus of Dutch COVID-19-related crisis communications from the Belgian government, which according to previous research (Liégeois, Mathysen 2022) can, in fact, be regarded as epidemiological crisis communications. More concretely, we considered the frames in which five terms – virus, coronavirus, COVID-19, epidemie and pandemie – inherent to this domain could occur and investigated the following three research questions: In which frames do our five target terms resurface within this domain- specific discourse tradition (RQ1)? Which functions do these frames fulfil within this domain-specific discourse tradition and can other domain-specific features (e.g., regarding the FEs of these frames) be found (RQ2)? Can these frames and their functions be linked back to the communicative strategies singled out by previous research on these Belgian epidemiological crisis communications (RQ3)?