Kornienko, A. V. Key Features of the Coronavirus Directive Discourse of St Petersburg Authorities. Political Linguistics. — 2020. — No 6 (84). — P. 53-66.

Abstract

This article presents the results of a sociolinguistic study of the directive discourse of the St Petersburg authorities which was addressed to the city's residents in the first months of the coronavirus epidemic. An analysis was made of the decisions taken by the St Petersburg government, the directives issued by its relevant committees, and the acts of legislation brought in over the period from March to May 2020 as a result of the epidemic. This analysis revealed the defining features of the discourse under study, i.e. the uncertainty, vagueness, and indistinctness of the concepts used within it; the unintelligibility of the documents themselves, which impeded their comprehension; their structural incompleteness; the inconsistency of the recommendations and requirements coming from the authorities; the advancement of intentionally unfulfillable directives, and finally the general orientation of the authorities towards indirect communication and implicit statements, which are unacceptable for directive discourse and generate ambiguity in their interpretation. The results obtained indicate that, even in the circumstances of an epidemic, the local authorities were not overly concerned about the issue of perception or an adequate (that is, meeting the intention of its creators) understanding of the directives issued on the part of those for whom the directives were intended. In the most difficult period at the beginning of the epidemic, as the study showed, the authorities failed to conduct a fully-fledged conversation with the people of St Petersburg.