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This paper studies the ritual and aesthetic performances of Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s Coronavirus press conferences. It argues that the press conferences are mediatized sanctuaries—solidaristic respites from the chaos of pandemic and partisan politics. They achieve this via performing a regular ritual of affliction where basic cultural commitments are affirmed, institutional action is validated, and the where the trouble of Coronavirus can healed as a result.

An open source corpus of all Dutch COVID-19 Press Conferences with sentences annotated on the basis of John Searle’s Speech Act taxonomy was created. It contains all 58 press conferences held between March 6 2020 and April 20 2021 and has 9.441 manually annotated sentences. Speech acts were annotated in a consistent manner, with a Krippendorff’s alpha of .71. The corpus is easy to use and rich in metadata, with lexical, syntactic, discourse (speaker, question or answer) features and information on the type of regulations being present. We analyse the press conferences in terms of speech act usage, giving insight into the use of speech acts over time, the relation of speech act usage to real world phenomena, the general structure of the press conferences and the division of roles between speakers. Relations were found between speech act usage and the type of press conference (i.e. easing, tightening or neutral) as well as the number of hospital admissions. Speech act classes showed preferred locations within the press conferences, indicating a general structure. Distinct roles between speakers were identified. We also investigate the use of our set of labelled sentences for training a speech act classifier and achieve a reasonable accuracy of .73 and a mean reciprocal rank of .74 with the state of the art transformer RoBERTa model.

On an annual basis, China’s “Two Sessions” draw researchers’ attention to the study of interpreting that comes along. However, the related research mostly focuses on interpreting strategies and skills, and rarely involves the interpreter who produces the interpreting. This paper collects both of two interpreters’ texts at the press conferences of the “Two Sessions” from 2010 to 2020 to build a parallel corpus. By comparing their interpreting, with the speeches of the leaders of the White House as a comparable corpus, the study seeks to probe into the similarities and differences between the interpreting styles of two interpreters from the linguistic perspective. It is found that when interpreting, the interpreter Sun has richer vocabulary and a higher lexical density than the interpreter Zhang. The interpreting style of Sun is closer to the written style, while Zhang’s style is more colloquial. Compared with the transcripts of the U.S. press conference, the linguistic features of Zhang’s interpreting is more similar to those in the comparable corpus in vocabulary richness, word length and readability. Therefore, Zhang’s interpreting might be more likely to be intelligible and acceptable to English speakers.

During the early phase of the Covid-19 crisis, televised speeches and press conferences were one of the preferred means of government communication. They emphasized the urgency and severity of the situation and allowed actors to lead news coverage. While in the immediate phase of the crisis these press conferences were also directed at the general public, their original function was, of course, to inform and influence media coverage. The article investigates how government press conferences were received in newspapers in the first phase of Covid-19, answering two research questions: Did a rally-around-the-flag effect occur among journalists during Covid-19? And how did government press conferences influence salience and sentiment in newspaper opinion pieces? To answer these questions, I draw on a unique dataset, including transcripts of all Covid-19 press conferences in five European countries between January and July 2020, as well as opinion pieces from tabloid and broadsheet newspapers. Based on a mix of automated and manual content analysis, the results reveal how factors such as country context, newspaper type, and the progress of a pandemic can influence how the government agenda is reflected in the media in times of crisis.

This study examined the pragmatic functions of hedging strategies used by the Federal Reserve System (Fed) Chair during press conferences. The Fed’s significant influence on U.S. monetary policy and global financial markets makes its communication methods crucial yet linguistically underexplored. This study employed a mixed-methods approach to examine the frequency and types of hedges, their situational usage, and pragmatic functions. The findings revealed a notable use of approximators and shields to adapt to the complexities of financial communication, with adaptors and plausibility shields being the most common. The Fed Chair employed hedging strategies to address sensitive economic issues, uncertain policies, and matters affecting financial markets and public perception. These hedging strategies were used to mitigate potential criticism, enhance flexibility, soften the tone, maintain credibility, ensure effective information delivery, and improve politeness. The study contributed to the understanding of linguistic hedging strategies in financial communication and underscored the strategic use of language in economic policy-making and financial stability.

This scientific work studies brand placement in the press conferences of soccer coaches and evaluates their communicative effectiveness through the measurement of their cognitive and affective effects on the viewers. In this research, we established the following objectives: (1) to examine the characteristics of the practice of brand placement in football press conferences: the diffusion times of brands, space occupied on the screen, and categories of brands placed; (2) to evaluate the behaviour of the human eye when viewing press conferences, in terms of continuous movements (saccades) and fixations (fixations) on brands; (3) to gauge the spontaneous and assisted recall of brands by subjects; (4) to verify the correlation between the persistence of visual fixations and recall/recognition; (5) to investigate the changes in subjects’ attitudes towards brands viewed in the experimental context. An exploratory observation was made that enabled a more in-depth knowledge and implementation of brand placement at sports conferences. For the experimental observation, a 2 × 2 factorial design of independent groups with total randomization was defined in order to perceive the influence of the variables “time” and “quantity” on the communicative effectiveness of the placed tags. In order to collect the data, a combination of several tested and validated tools was used, namely the screen division grid in surface units, as advocated by Bravo (1995); the technology of eye-tracking as an instrument for the recognition of the ocular movements of subjects in the observation space; surveys tested for cognitive gauging; and a semantic differential scale to assess attitudes toward the brand. The results indicate that the subjects recall in a spontaneous and suggested way the brands placed at the press conferences and develop positive attitudes about them. The recall is influenced by the diffusion time of the stimulus, and above all, the type of placement on the screen is decisive. It was not found that the brands to which subjects develop more positive attitudes were the most remembered. Finally, the face of the soccer coach is the main focus of attention of the subjects, and the areas surrounding this interlocutor are the ones that arouse the most interest in terms of the placement of brands.

In contrast to views that treat positions and standpoints as defining the scope of argumentation, our normative pragmatic approach sees positions and standpoints as interactionally emergent products of argumentative work. Here, this is shown in a detailed case study of a question-answer session in which former US President Donald J. Trump was pressed by journalists to express and defend his standpoint on the Charlottesville protests by neo-Nazis and White nationalists. Trump repeatedly evaded efforts to pin down his standpoint; however, with each of his answers to the questions, his built-up position circumscribed the range of possible standpoints he could take. To the end, he avoided backing down from any prior statement expressing his standpoint, while also preserving a degree of maneuverability regarding what his standpoint amounted to.

The journal, of which Mochizuki is chief editor, is published by Japan's Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences (RIMS) at Kyoto University, where he works. The conjecture roughly states that if a lot of small primes divide two numbers, a and b, then only a few, large ones divide their sum, c. A confirmed proof could change number theory by, for example, providing an innovative approach to proving Fermat's last theorem, the legendary problem formulated by Pierre de Fermat in 1637 and solved only in 1994. In the world of mathematics, a journal's seal of approval is often not the end of the peer-review process.

Within the framework of pragma-dialectics, this paper analyzes the use of dissociations in the spokespersons’ replies at the press conferences held by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs between 2015 and 2017. As shown in the research results, to cut down the authority of their opponents in criticizing China and to convince the international general public of the Chinese standpoints, four subtypes of dissociation are used, which can be differentiated as: “distorted” Term I versus “authentic” Term II, “ambiguous” Term I versus “univocal” Term II, “broadened” Term I versus “exact” Term II, and “narrowed” Term I versus “exact” Term II. The strategic maneuvering carried out by the spokespersons in confronting their immediate opponents by means of the various subtypes of dissociation is in the first place directed at their primary audience, i.e. the international general public. To make a convincing case, in using dissociations the spokespersons not only adapt in their strategic maneuvering to the demands of their primary audience but also in their selection from the topical potential and the presentational devices.

In his first two and a half years as president, Biden has held fewer news conferences than his predecessors. He has also given fewer interviews to major news organizations. At the same time, the White House is contacting an array of social media influencers to spread its message.