Directives as health communication: A corpus based study

Our understanding of directives is derived from extensive theoretical and empirical work conducted in pragmatics and related disciplines. However, this predominantly draws on spoken discourse and small-sized or elicited datasets. Our study drew upon a one-million-word corpus of public guidance prepared and published by the UK Government during the Covid-19 pandemic that was rich in directive use. We used established corpus methods to identify novel ways of performing directives in relation to existing taxonomies and the unique context set by the pandemic – a situation where the government, on the basis of emerging science and emergency legislation, both suggested and imposed protective actions that impacted on most aspects of daily life at the population level. We identified directives by exploring the co-texts of the lexical verbs used in guidance, sampled using keyness as a measure of prominence. Our taxonomy of directives integrated an eclectic range of forms, showing guidance to be a hybrid genre, combining legal discourse with risk and health communication. The detection of directives permitted commentary on the implications of different combinations of forms and actions in the context of health communication, and highlights the challenges and opportunities related to identifying directives at scale in a corpus.