»I have been home in quarantine since Monday«: Relating Storytelling and Argumentation in Social Media Comments on Political Speeches

Abstract

This article examines narrative practices in the context of political speeches on the corona crisis. The qualitative analysis is based on a corpus of 650 social media comments posted in response to the so-called lockdown speeches by Sebastian Kurz and Angela Merkel in March 2020. The comments feature forms of fragmentary narration that are used by the participants both as resources of credibility and descriptiveness and as a means of positioning themselves in the context of the lockdown measures being announced.