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. To study directive use, our study drew upon representations of a genre labelled ‘guidance’—a one-million-word corpus of documents prepared and published by the UK Government communicating preventive actions relating to the Covid-19 pandemic. 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 population level. We identified directives by exploring the co-texts of the lexical verbs used in the corpus, sampled using keyness as a measure of prominence. Our taxonomy of directives integrated an eclectic range of forms and strategies, showing guidance to be a hybrid genre, combining legal discourse with risk and health communication. The detection of directives permitted reflection on the different combinations of forms and actions in the context of health communication and highlighted the challenges and opportunities related to identifying directives at scale in a corpus.