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Abstract Misinformation, disinformation, and fake news are available across diverse media, causing distrust in governmental and health institutions. In this context, the use of language has been of great interest in research, specifically in health communication, on social media, and in traditional news media. Our aim is to analyse and compare how the successive doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been presented in different forms of knowledge communication, namely scientific research papers and the media, including online magazines and newspaper articles. By focusing on frequency, collocates, and phraseology of booster and dose, we trace differences in how boosters are presented in both lay and professional contexts of communication. Scientific discourse shows a marked preference for the more neutral and cautious term dose, which is also associated with the description of administration procedures. News discourse is characterised both by a higher incidence of the word booster (implying a reinforcement of an already existing immunity) and by the choice of referring to the institutional voices recommending vaccines. Results shed light on how different discourses manifest their perceived functions through lexical choice, as well as how news discourse uses and reinterprets scientific discourse in the light of what is relevant to the audience.

This case study analyses the socio-pragmatic effects of invoked multiple voices in a commemorative speech delivered by Austrian writer Michael Köhlmeier on the occasion of the 2018 Austrian commemoration day against violence and fascism. Köhlmeier uses different forms of discourse representation to blame politicians of the then Austrian government for their political statements and actions. The focus of this article is on the speaker's combination of (imagined and real) sources and forms of discourse representation, resulting in strategically deployed perspective shifts to express opposition and blame. Furthermore, the sociopragmatic functions of these rhetorical and textual strategies in the context of situation, as well as in the wider context of the Austrian culture of collective remembrance are explored, in particular by showing that by blaming actual Austrian politicians for their political statements and actions, the traditional consensual commemorative discourse is breached. This latter effect is probably responsible for the huge public attention the speech attracted in 2018. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]