This research adopts Critical Discourse Analysis as a perspective to explore howkindness was expressed and promoted in university communities and citycommunities from January to March in 2020 when the Covid pandemic broke out inthe UK and provide a window on British culture in which kindness was expressedand promoted through discourse. It combines a qualitative method with acorpus-based quantitative method. It is found that kindness was meant forproviding support and showing compassion and inclusion to community members andthat strategies in lexis, syntax and metaphor can reproduce or resist theexpression and promotion of kindness in communities. During the pandemic, theintentional kindness expressed by community authorities was respect of diversityrather than inclusion of different values or ethnicity and no substantialsupport was provided to vulnerable members even though authorities were tryingto impress the public by claiming that they were making constant efforts tosupport the community. Case studies revealed that we should caution against theuse of passivation and the pronouns like they.

Using a large-scale corpus of 706 coronavirus cartoons by male and female Arabartists, this study takes a fresh and more cognitive look at sexism inmultimodal discourse. Specifically, it examines the role of salience and grammar(and hence of metaphor and metonymy) in gender bias and/or in discriminationagainst women. It argues that both men and women are vulnerable to the influenceof stereotypical and outdated beliefs that create unconscious bias. But thisraises the crucial issue of whether we can speak of ‘overt’ sexism in images.Issues around terminology and conceptualization are thus also investigated.Importantly, this paper makes the following contributions to feminist andcross-cultural pragmatics: (i) it brings a distinctly Arabic perspective togender and language; (ii) it expands socio-cognitive pragmatics beyond spokenand written communication; (iii) it shows a close coupling between an Arabicgrammar and other aspects of culture; and (iv) it has the potential for impactbeyond academia, specifically in the sphere of coronavirus care or of healthcommunication.