This three-part study examines the construction of disaster warnings through linguistic theoretical and methodological insights from usage-based analysis, multimodal discourse analysis, and Folk Linguistics. Drawing on insights from usage-based analysis, the first study examined the linguistic realization of directives in official Japanese disaster warnings on Twitter over the course of two years. The findings revealed a high frequency of honorific request constructions in the call-to-action move in the disaster warnings. The results of the discourse analysis of the warnings also revealed style shifts between the two dominant honorific request constructions, Verb-te kudasai construction and o-Verb stem kudasai. We argue the two constructions signal different levels of urgency in accordance with the warning recipients’ degree of freedom of action upon complying with the recommended actions. The second study took a social semiotic approach to multimodality to analyze televised tsunami warnings produced by a Japanese public service media. This study demonstrated the moment-by-moment construction of a tsunami warning discourse through the interplay of language and other semiotic resources. Findings of the second study revealed a mixed use of Verb-te kudasai construction in the spoken text and Verb-te construction as part of the graphic text in framing institutional discourse and urgency. The third study examined Japanese and North American English speakers’ underlying beliefs and attitudes regarding language use in disaster warning contexts from warning recipients’ point of view. A thematic analysis of conversation data obtained from sociolinguistic interviews uncovered cross-cultural presumptions of marking social identities, affective stance, and urgency through language use. This study brings into focus the linguistic concepts and perspectives on creating a sense of urgency when issuing disaster warnings. By illustrating the framing of urgency and other contextually relevant features through language use and other semiotic features in disaster warning contexts, this study suggests a promising trajectory of applied sociolinguistic research in hazard and disaster science.
Amy Ives Takebe (Mon,) studied this question.