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The study 'Communicating the unknown' draws on an annotation approach to examine uncertainty in British and German newspaper articles on the coronavirus pandemic. We developed a tagset in an interdisciplinary team from corpus linguistics and sociology. After working out a gold standard on a pilot corpus, we apply the annotation to the entire corpus drawing on an “annotation-by-query” approach in CQPWeb, based on uncertainty constructions that have been extracted from the gold standard data. The annotated data are then evaluated and sociologically contextualised. On this basis, we study the development of uncertainty markers in the period under study and compare media discourses in Germany and the UK. We document here the CQL queries which we used to measure uncertainty in our corpora.

This paper documents the corpus queries formulated in CQL (Corpus Query Language) which we used in the study "Communicating the unknown. An interdisciplinary annotation study of uncertainty in the coronavirus pandemic."