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Multimodal Specifics of COVID-19 Poster: Impact on the Audience // Tomsk State Pedagogical University Bulletin. 2023. Issue 1 (225). P. 49-57

In recent years, COVID-19 encourages medical organizations to intensify informing the population to stop the spread of the infection. A health poster is one of the most popular educational tools for the mass, therefore it is necessary to pay attention to linguistic and extralinguistic aspects of poster which have a big impact on people. The aim of the article is to identify the main strategies and tactics used in COVID-19 posters to prevent the infection, and to compare verbal and visual features of a health poster in Russian and English. The material for the study is health posters aimed at COVID-19 prevention in the English and Russian languages, posted on the official websites of various medical and healthcare organizations. The main method used in the study is multimodal discourse analysis. The article presents a comprehensive analysis of the main aspects of verbal and nonverbal impact in COVID-19 posters in English and Russian. Using multimodal discourse analysis, we distinguished the main strategies and tactics of COVID-19 posters impact, as well as their common and distinctive features in English and Russian. The main strategies used in the COVID-19 poster include the draw attention strategy, the informing strategy, the call for protection strategy, and the prohibition strategy. There are four strategies of the COVID-19 poster to impact the audience. Each strategy implements particular tactics using language, images, composition and other features. Moreover, there are some differences in posters in English and Russian from a cultural point of view, which can be explained by different context of communication between the two cultures, according to E. Hall’s research.

Keywords: medical poster, COVID-19, multimodal discourse analysis, impact, strategies, tactics