A cross-linguistic study of public informational messages in Lithuanian and Ukrainian
The study examines the linguistic peculiarities embedded within informational messages related to COVID-19. This research, based on a sample of public signs and posters intended to direct the public’s behaviour in response to COVID-19 pandemic, compares the structural and semantic patterns of informational messages. The material analysed was collected in the form of photos in Lithuania and Ukraine in 2021–2022, during the period of the second wave of the pandemic. Employing a qualitative data analysis, the study centres on comparing the syntactic, grammatical, and lexico-semantic patterns applied in the textual construction of these messages across the two languages and cultural landscapes. The findings of this study are in line with those of previous studies in Estonian, Finnish, French, and other languages but also reveal distinctions. The findings contribute to the body of research on effective and reliable communication, underscoring the imperative for responsible use of persuasive structures and meanings in public texts on sensitive issues. The results of the study point to many similarities across two cultures speaking distantly related languages within the Balto-Slavic branch. Among the disparities discerned within this comparative analysis are impersonal sentence structures. In the Ukrainian sample, they tend to be more frequent than in the Lithuanian dataset, which may indicate an intentional shift of responsibility from the communicator to higher authorities, thus possibly simplifying the conveyance of prohibitions or strong recommendations to the recipients regarding behaviours that they might not want to adopt. On the other hand, the Lithuanian messages demonstrate a preference for the first-person plural constructions over impersonal structures, possibly reflecting greater solidarity and empathy from the communicator, and at the same time suggesting a friendly appeal for changes in behaviour.