A speech act study of online comments towards COVID-19 report in the Malaysian National Security Council’s official Facebook page
Nor Hairunnisa Mohammad Nor1, Nor Syamimi Iliani Che Hassan2.
The COVID-19 pandemic has adversely affected the world, crippling
its economies, impacting the education system, and debilitating
emotions and mental health. However, with the emergence of new
virus mutations, Malaysia has yet to win the battle against this wave
of COVID-19. This has led to diverse reactions among its citizens.
We observe that many Malaysians are now flooding their social
media platforms to vent their frustration or even blame various
parties for this COVID-19 spike in the country. Hence, this study was
designed to investigate the speech acts employed by Malaysian
Facebook users in constructing their online comments amid the
COVID-19 crisis. The study corpus consisted of 555 Facebook
comments to daily reports of COVID-19 cases published on the
Facebook page of the Malaysian National Security Council in July
and August 2021. The entire data was coded using ATLAS.ti version
22. Based on the findings, we discovered that the most frequently
constructed speech acts in this study corpus were assertive, followed
by expressive and directive, which were addressed to two target
recipients: the government and the public. The analysis of this study
would enable us to understand the various ways language is used in
computer-mediated communication, particularly the types of speech
acts used in social media such as Facebook.
Affiliation:
- Universiti Teknologi MARA Cawangan Kelantan , Malaysia
- Universiti Teknologi MARA Cawangan Kelantan , Malaysia
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