‘I want to remember how nice it felt to talk to someone’: optimism and positive emotions in the linguistic reconstruction of COVID-19 lockdown experiences in the UK

Abstract

This chapter aims to explore how emotional language construing experiences of UK COVID-19 lockdown in the present frames expectations for future behaviours and intended memories. We analyse 102 responses collected through an online narrative survey during the first lockdown in the United Kingdom. The survey asked participants to articulate ‘an image to remember lockdown by’. Taking a positive discourse analysis approach, using corpus linguistics and systemic functional linguistics tools, we challenge the primarily negative mainstream discourses of COVID-19 and lockdown experiences and explore how language choices evaluating different aspects of life in lockdown evoke emotion to construe a desired projected future. Findings indicate that respondents actively and selectively articulate primarily positive intended memories based on kinship peace and nature that contrast with normal life experiences. Such choices are framed within emotional states enacted through language choices. We argue that these projected memories act as a ‘time capsule’ whereby decisions to retain positive memories help to promote adaptive well-being in the face of potentially overwhelmingly negative circumstances.

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ORCID for Lexi Webster: orcid.org/0000-0001-5721-8236

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