What we talk about when we talk about COVID-19: a comparative study on China’s epidemics metaphor framing

Abstract

The current research examines the metaphor choice for Covid-19, a major public health issue in today's world. Drawing on corpus data, comparisons are made for the Chinese and English versions of People's Daily Online, the official mouthpiece for the China's Communist Party. It is found that the two media share similar domains to project Covid-19 with war taking the dominant vehicle, but they have different focuses and preferences in the metaphorical mappings as they are facing varied audience. Additionally, when a contagion becomes global concern and is normalized, it is not merely a target in metaphor, but a source to project other issues.

The article begins with an overview of Covid-19 and theoretical backgrounds for metaphor and its position in cognitive linguistics and public discourse. The second section reflects on previous bibliography on disease and war metaphor. The third section illustrates the procedures for data collection and corpus construction. Data from the two corpora are analyzed and compared in the following sections. Finally there is a concluding part for further discussion.