COVID-19 and government communication: A descriptive pilot study of bilingual (DT - FR) crisis communication in Belgium

Government communication fulfils an important role in the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic. First, we rely on the government to provide us with all the necessary information regarding the danger entailed by SARS-CoV-2. Secondly, the government seeks to guide the population towards a certain behaviour through its various communicative channels. However, in comparison with other aspects of government action (e.g., new legislation, economic measures), the communicative actions of governments surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic have received less attention within the social sciences. Accordingly, this pilot study aims to delve into said communicative aspect from a descriptive text-linguistic point of view, looking at bilingual (DT – FR) COVID-19-related government communication in Belgium. To this end, we assembled a parallel corpus with texts from the Belgian Crisis Centre on the matter. Starting from the four textual criteria singled out by Gautier (2009) – (i) text function, (ii) text predicate, (iii) information structure and (iv) stylistic-formulative prototypical features –, we aspire to learn more about the communicative goals and strategies used by the Belgian government and to compare these results to three previous studies on COVID-19-related government communication