WP274 Normativity, language and Covid-19

The UK?s recent experience of the coronavirus pandemic involves the fracturing of many established social and sociolinguistic norms, alongside erratic and only partly successful attempts to impose new norms. The paper offers a conceptual overview of how norms are discursively constituted. It then sketches out some of the potentially damaging sociolinguistic consequences of the crisis of normativity occasioned by the pandemic.