Discourse of Fear in the Backdrop of COVID-19: A Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

Covid-19 started from China and spread across the globe resulting in economic challenges,
social fracas and psychological unrest. It also triggered strange fear as it was associated with a
novel virus and turned-out a pandemic engulfing the whole world. Fear functions as a signal
of threat and triggers adaptive responses. This study aimed at examining the e-discourse
produced during the spread of the virus and explored the most frequent lexical bundles in the
discourse to analyse whether fear appears as a recurrent theme. The e-discourse was developed
from webpages that appeared with search word ‘COVID-19’ spanning over the period of May
03, 2020 to May 20,2020 to build the corpus of one million word during the outbreak of the
pandemic. Fear does not take place rather it is a social construct. In contemporary public
discourse and popular culture, fear as a basic human emotion is all-pervasive. The study
combined quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis for the interpretation of the data. For
the quantification of lexical bundles, Corpus tool AntConc 3.4.4w (Anthony, 2014) was used
to explore the most frequent lexical bundles in the e-discourse related to COVID-19. The
quantitative analysis was complemented with qualitative analysis for in-depth interpretation
of the data. The study revealed the high frequency of linguistic choices related to psychiatry.
spread of the disease as a pandemic and mental health issues particularly related to children
and youth, indicating that besides physiological issues, the pandemic had serious psychological
implications. Thus, COVID-19 spread across the globe and resulted in intimidation and fear as
The virus had no remedy in the then-existing situation. Hence, this suggests taking into
consideration the psychological repercussions along with the physiological devastation caused
by pandemics.