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As we take stock nationally of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the health and economy of the UK, we would do well to think about the many people who have not made a good recovery from the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The World Health Organization (2021) defines the “post COVID-19 condition” (or Long COVID) as […]
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In response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, the Australian government has closed its borders, but welcomes home Australian citizens. However, it’s not as simple as boarding a plane and flying home. Due to restrictions placed on international passenger arrivals into the country, tens of thousands of Australians are still stuck overseas. Australians stranded in other […]
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We are still in the maelstrom that is the Covid-19 pandemic and are likely to remain so for some time to come. The loss of life and economic hardship are apparent to all and are shocking to even seasoned observers. However, the pandemic may yet exact some of its greatest damage on the many thousands […]
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Permit as a speech act addresses a future action to be undertaken by the addressee in his own interests, which almost always appears to concur with a Request for a Permit. In the context of social distancing, we often receive Requests for a Permit, such as when tactful others ask for our permission to venture […]
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In the following, we discuss the speech act type ‘Invite’. This speech act expresses that the speaker wishes her addressee to know that she is in favour of a future action to be performed by the other, which she believes may involve costs to herself and benefits to the addressee. She also believes however that […]
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In this blog we discuss the speech act ‘suggest’. This speech act involves the situation where a speaker is communicating that he/she is as much in favour of the addressee performing a future action as in the latter’s own interests. This speech act category is closely related to the speech act ‘request’, but in the […]
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Of the various speech acts used in the wake of COVID-19 and the corresponding need for social distancing, ‘Apologise’ is perhaps the most important. Since the enforcement of social distancing unavoidably leads to moral uproar, we often find ourselves apologising profusely for trying to safeguard our own health – an interesting paradox that can be […]
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Until December 2019, I was in Nanjing, some five hundred kilometres from Wuhan where the first cases of the new lung disease were then discovered. When things unfolded in January, I initially felt a sense of having escaped a potentially fatal danger by a hair’s breadth; only to realize a bit later that this wasn’t […]
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