Open AccessPost-Traumatic Growth and Identity Construction in Covid-19 Messages Delivered to the People of Ghana by President Nana Akuffo Addo
Author(s) -
Cynthia Logogye,
Bernard Asafo-Duho,
Joseph Benjamin Archibald Afful
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
international journal of english language teaching
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2329-7921
pISSN - 2329-7913
DOI - 10.5430/ijelt.v9n1p1
Subject(s) - identity (music) , vocabulary , prosperity , pandemic , covid-19 , identity crisis , psychology , social psychology , linguistics , medicine , political science , law , personality , philosophy , disease , infectious disease (medical specialty) , physics , acoustics
This work analyses post-traumatic growth in Covid-19 addresses delivered to the people of Ghana by President Nana Akuffo Addo. We draw on Post-Traumatic Growth Theory to explain how Akuffo Addo constructs a new identity for himself and the nation in order to navigate through the pandemic and forge an agenda of growth and prosperity for Ghana. The study employs a linguistic content analysis approach. The data consists of twenty different speeches from the president to the people. The speeches are first analysed and coded manually for the five main tenets of Post-Traumatic Growth (PTG) identified in the updates. Consequently, the linguistic markers that are used in reconstructing the Ghanaian identity in response to the pandemic are delineated and mapped to the goals of the president using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count 2015 (LIWC2015; Pennebaker et al., 2015) software; a vocabulary analysis tool. The analysis showed that there was a high prevalence of personal pronoun use, use of positive-emotion words, and cognitive-processing words. This confirms our hypothesis that linguistic markers can be used to detect PTG.