"Due to Heightened Risk": Qualifying Risk in the Debate over Covid-19

Our paper presents an analysis of the conceptualisation and framing of ‘risk’ in the Covid-19 pandemic. We investigate all occurrences of risk-based vocabulary in two corpora dealing with the spread and the political/social/economic consequences of Covid19 from February 2020 to February 2021 (i.e. the InterDiplo Covid-19 corpus and the CORD-19 corpus). We apply a mixed-method approach to show how the concept of ‘risk’ is lexically qualified in the public communication of a hot issue such as the pandemic. Therefore, after a first recognition of all related expressions of the nominal realization of “risk” in the worldlists of the two corpora, we investigate their concordances to find typical collocations and phraseology used to qualify risk in Covid-19 epidemic. Our results show a clear tendency towards a negative thematisation of “risk” which is characterized by patterns highlighting uncertainty and fear in the fight against a disease spreading on an unprecedented scale and posing total threats that not only involve individuals but affect humanity globally. The focus on the phraseology around the lexical elements helps reconstruct communicative functions and approaches that characterize the two discursive contexts.