A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Epidemic Prevention Slogans

Language is the carrier of civilization, while urban health communication slogans offer a window into a city's moral and ethical standards. During the COVID-19 pandemic and the post-pandemic era, some regions or social media platforms have witnessed uncivilized language use on health communication, which is detrimental to the construction of urban civilization in China. This article, based on Chen Xinren's framework of critical discourse analysis, probes into the health communication slogans from the perspectives of interpersonal communication and language civilization, comparing and analyzing them in the early and post-epidemic periods. From the angle of critical discourse analysis, this article reveals the social roots of issues such as power inequality and violent constraints behind the discourse, and evaluates their effects in emotional transmission, interpersonal communication, and epidemic prevention mobilization. By criticizing and analyzing health slogans that frequently appeared in the early stages of the epidemic, characterized by "simplicity and brutality", and studying the new characteristics of slogans in the post-epidemic era compared to the early stages, as well as the effectiveness of epidemic management, we can optimize the discourse mode of health communication. Starting from both the central government and local government levels, it provides health communication slogan designers with the ideal civilized linguistic construction of promotional slogans, from programmatic documents at the central government level to the implementation of specific preventive measures at the local government level. For the former, it seeks to achieve a balance between ensuring the effectiveness of government's epidemic prevention decisions and building a good government-citizen relationship; for the latter, it explores more legitimate, polite, down-to-earth, elegant, and appropriate ways of expressing localized language to promote the benign development of epidemic prevention and control and interpersonal linguistic civilization.