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In:Science Communication on the Internet: Old genres meet new genres
Edited by María José Luzón and Carmen Pérez-Llantada
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 308] 2019
► pp. 173–194

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Chapter 9
#Vaccineswork

Recontextualizing the content of epidemiology reports on Twitter

Published online: 4 December 2019
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.308.09orp
Abstract
This study examines the ways in which information originating in epidemiological reports is recontextualized in the @ECDC_VPD account, the Twitter account of a European health agency. Using a corpus-assisted discourse analytical approach complemented with multimodal analysis, this study compares the strategies used to achieve proximity (Hyland 2010) in the space-constrained genre of Twitter with those used in the source texts. The study finds that the macro-structural properties of the @ECDC_VPD tweets have become more complex over time and the use of images to enhance meaning-making has increased. The drive to present claims as newsworthy, coupled with the 140/280-character constraint, results in the tweets containing greater relative use of stance markers and lower use of epistemic modals than is observed in the source texts. The @ECDC_VPD tweets display a greater range of engagement strategies than is seen in the source texts.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Exploiting proximity resources in traditional and digital genres
    • 2.1Proximity resources
    • 2.2Organization, argument and credibility
    • 2.3Stance and engagement
  • 3.Research questions
  • 4.Data and method
    • 4.1Data and corpus compilation
    • 4.2Method
  • 5.Results and discussion
    • 5.1Credibility
    • 5.2Organization and argument
    • 5.3Stance and engagement
      • 5.3.1The ECDC reports corpus
      • 5.3.2The @ECDC_VPD corpus
  • 6.Conclusion
  • References
References (25)
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This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

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