Leveraging ‘uncertainty’ during a global health crisis: An analysis of the strategic deployment of hedging in government press conferences in early 2020

Speeches given by government leaders during a time of crisis are important tools in the management of public anxiety and behaviour. The early months of the COVID-19 pandemic positioned leaders and populations alike in situations of high and sustained uncertainty. At the onset of the crisis in January 2020, there was limited knowledge about the novel coronavirus (SARS-Cov-2), infection routes and mortality rates. Government leaders had to balance what was known and unknown as they responded to local situations and introduced unprecedented infection control guidelines and restrictions to the day-to-day life of citizens.

In the context of this paper, we take up the notion of uncertainty as a cognitive state derived from a situation in which there is inadequate or incomplete knowledge thus making it impossible to predict future events. Uncertainty is present in all types of discourse (e.g., decision-making, event planning, and risk management) and its management is key in the communication of health risks and government attempts to direct the behavior of citizens. When communicating with the public about emerging infectious diseases, leaders and experts make careful decisions about what to say and where and when to make statements. During the COVID-19 pandemic, government leaders have made extensive use of press conferences as a key means of communicating with citizens. Speeches given during press conferences are viewed as texts constructed by a variety of contributors (e.g. the speaker, experts, speech writers) and are therefore considered as communication tools used in the course of governing rather than examples of spontaneous or naturalistic speech.

This paper presents selected extracts from the analysis of a corpora of press conference speeches made by political leaders in Australia, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, New Zealand and the United Kingdom to explore how uncertainty was linguistically managed and leveraged by these speakers at key time points during the first six months of the health crisis. We focus on the use of the linguistic device of hedges by female leaders in Hong Kong and New Zealand. Hedges are markers of uncertainty at the discourse level and are often used to soften the forcefulness of a statement or direction. Hedging also serves pragmatic functions as it is used to both convey information and build a relationship with the listener in order to direct behaviour. Hedges include modal verbs such as can, may, must, shall, will, could and are often used in health communications to indicate likelihood, ability, capacity, advice, obligation.