Small-sized public directive texts during covid pandemic in Germany

The article brings into focus different approaches to studying small-sized public directive texts, which appeared in public areas in Germany to regulate people’s behavior during the 2020 COVID pandemic.

The article studies the major themes of these polycode texts, analyses the correlation between verbal and non-verbal components of the examined texts, describes peculiarities of the non-verbal component, such as color, font and picture image, defines the ways of foregrounding semantically determining elements of the texts.

Particular emphasis is made on characteristics of the addressee and the sender.

The authors point out the characteristic feature of these texts to “save face” on the part of the addressee when the sender of the message puts forward peremptory requirements in the situation of temporary limitation of civil rights and freedoms.

The article studies both direct and indirect strategies of inducement as well as methods tactics allowing these strategies to be most effective and contributing to diminishing the personality-restraining impact of the texts on the addressee.

Furthermore, the article analyzes various means of expressing inducement in the studied texts, such as the infinitive, imperative and infinitive sentence, and draws conclusions about the prevailing forms in the analyzed texts

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