Misconstruction of Covid-19 : an analysis of semantic concepts created by fake news

• Ano de defesa: 2021
• Autor(a) principal: Cardoso, Nathália Fraga
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul; Escola de Humanidades; Brasil; PUCRS; Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras
• Palavras-chave em Português: Covid-19 pandemic; Fake News; Cognitive Semantics; Mind Maps; Pandemia de Covid-19; Semântica Cognitiva; Mapas Mentais; LINGUISTICA, LETRAS E ARTES::LETRAS
• Link de acesso: http://tede2.pucrs.br/tede2/handle/tede/9538

The Fake News phenomenon has permeated and tainted major events worldwide, affecting society’s understanding of what is true and what is not. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the world faced not only difficulties in fighting the virus but was also bombarded with misinformation published in online platforms. The present study aims to propose an outline of how the pandemic of Covid-19 in 2020 in the United Kingdom was displayed, through news articles published in the website Politicalite.com. The theme is to understand the Fake News language, and how they hold the power to create concepts in the audience’s imagery. A theoretical background on Journalism and Fake News is firstly presented, followed by the theoretical foundations of cognitive semantics, the linguistic framework in this research. The Prototype Theory of concepts is highlighted, especially the radial network representation, which inspired the mind maps displayed in this dissertation. In the methodology, noun phrases from fifteen pieces retrieved from the website are analyzed. This material shall be categorized into three conceptual constructions: China, Lockdown and Vaccine. After the selection, the noun phrases are comprised in mind maps, in order to fully visualize the conceptual construction of what these three components represent for the website. Next, there is an assessment of the results, and the conclusion points to China as the villain in the pandemic, Lockdown as a deadly concept and Vaccine as the salvation for the UK.