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|a The article considers the problem of pragmatic characteristics of the COVID-19 discourse. It reveals and characterizes the main strategies and tactics of this type of communication. The lack of attention to the coronavirus discourse shown by linguists must be explained by an absolute novelty of this communicative and social phenomenon, its recent introduction into our communicative world. Just a few works on the problems of coronavirus communication can be found in linguistics and other social sciences. They sporadically concentrate on some issues concerning the coronavirus discourse without providing its overall pragmalinguistic or any other structure. Therefore, the relevance of our research aiming at finding and characterizing the communicative strategies and tactics of the coronavirus discourse is beyond argument. While the term “speech/communicative strategy” implies a person’s or people’s overall communicative behavior intended to achieve some goal, a speech tactic involves a particular technique used to achieve a certain goal. The object of our analysis is internet news articles about coronavirus (top news feeds in most popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, Bing, AltaVista, etc.). Our choice of the object is predetermined by the highest degree of popularity of internet news articles among the population as well as their high pragmatic potential. The article shows that the system of strategies and tactics depends on a particular type of the COVID-19 discourse (statistical, socially oriented, and popular science discourse). Thus, the statistical discourse is characterized by just a few tactics (the generalizing tactics, the specifying tactics, etc.) which represent the strategy of fast reporting. The popular science discourse with its leading strategy of education is not exuberant in tactics either. This type of discourse is characterized by the tactics of presentation, argumentation, definition, etc. as there is no need to use a lot of tactical techniques to popularize objective knowledge. The only type of the COVID-19 discourse which has developed a welldisposed system of tactics is the socially oriented discourse (the tactics of showing care, shocking by statistics, direct recommendation, positive or negative forecasting, etc.), which is predetermined by the specific character of its main strategy of persuasion. A combination of several tactics in one context is a common feature of any type of the COVID-19 discourse.
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