Semantic Prosody of Crisis Language in World Health Organization Health Emergency Bulletins: A Corpus-Based Analysis of 2014–2024 Ebola Covid & MPOX

Abstract

This study examines the semantic prosody of crisis language in World Health Organization (WHO) health emergency bulletins published between 2014 and 2024, covering the Ebola, COVID-19, and mpox emergencies. Drawing on Sinclair's (1991) collocation theory, Stubbs' (2001) semantic prosody concept, and Bednarek's (2008) evaluation framework, a purpose-built corpus of 850,000 words of WHO official communications is analyzed using Sketch Engine. The study documents the semantic prosodies of the 20 most frequent 'crisis' lexical items across the three emergencies demonstrating systematic changes in the prosodic environments of terms including 'outbreak,' 'spread,' 'contain,' 'surge,' 'overwhelm,' 'escalate,' and 'resolve.' The findings show that WHO crisis language exhibits a distinctive tension between urgency-signaling prosodies and institutional reassurance prosodies, and that the relative weight of these prosodic orientations shifts significantly across the three emergencies analyzed. The study contributes to corpus linguistics, health communication research, and institutional discourse analysis. It further demonstrates that semantic prosody functions as a key mechanism through which public health institutions balance alarm and reassurance in real-time emergency communication. Comparative analysis across Ebola, COVID-19, and mpox datasets reveals evolving discursive strategies aligned with changes in global media ecology and risk governance frameworks over the decade. These patterns suggest increasing institutional reflexivity in communicative framing of uncertainty and threat management across successive health emergencies. The findings underscore implications for crisis communication design policy formulation and media interpretation of public health messaging practices over time.