COVID-19 Advertorials Accentuating Fright and Xenophobia in Ecosystem: An Eco-linguisticApproach to SFL

Abstract

The present study explores manipulation of language of COVID-19 advertorials to achieve specific goal of fear and xenophobia among people through ecolinguistic study of five advertorials published on COVID-19 on five global websites. To the best of author’s knowledge, few researches have been conducted on advertorials of different websites in this COVID-19 language context. The purpose of this research is to investigate and apply Halliday’s (1970) three semantic meta-functions proposed in Systemic Functional Linguistics (henceforth SFL) on corona advertorials from ecolinguistic perspective. Collection of five corona advertorials was gathered as data from five different websites. Only one corona advertorial from each website was built. Ecolinguistic analysis of Halliday’s three meta function was adopted as analytical framework to analyse elements of fear and xenophobia in the language of COVID-19 advertorials. Present research employed qualitative, descriptive method containing observation. Results revealed that 3 meta-functions of ecolinguistic SFL can be used in shedding light on use of language in these advertorials to sustain and invigorate a global narrative of fright and xenophobia. Findings showed that language of COVID-19 advertorials accentuates elements of fright and xenophobia in ecosystem. Results of current study will deliver a guideline of didactic inferences for future researchers in the field.