Where Covid metaphors come from: reconsidering context and modality in metaphor

Abstract

Pandemics such as Covid-19 are often described in terms of “wars” or “waves” and “troughs.” But this imagery has its potential shortcomings, and therefore a great many researchers and commentators argue that we are thinking about the coronavirus pandemic the wrong way, suggesting replacing the war or ocean analogy with a better or particularly appropriate one, wildfire. Yet, the rarely asked question is: Where do Covid-19 metaphors come from? This type of metaphorical creativity, the so-called context-induced metaphors, has been somewhat systematically investigated in linguistic metaphor research, but not in the literature on nonverbal and multimodal metaphor. I argue that for context-induced creativity to be fully appreciated we need to move beyond verbal metaphors, or verbal manifestations of metaphor, and consider factors that commonly produce creative multimodal metaphors. Will the evidence from multimodality confirm or challenge the linguistic findings? There may be other major possible sources of metaphorical creativity, ones based more on visual or multimodal thinking, but which have not been identified before because data from non-linguistic behavior had not been examined. I thus show that there is a real gap in the literature in that respect and my study of political cartoons fills this both in terms of data and theory. In this article, I will limit myself to the discussion of six motivational forces or contextual factors (in no order of importance): (1) the immediate physical environment, (2) the immediate cultural context, (3) the immediate social setting, (4) knowledge about the major elements participating in the discourse, (5) physical resemblance between the source and target concepts, and (6) word plays and literalizations of famous proverbs and idioms in a language. Sometimes these factors work singly, but often in combination. It is argued that these kinds of context, albeit involved in discourse production and comprehension, do not control discourse as cognitive context models do. Particularly interesting is that among the thousands of books and articles on knowledge, so little is said on the discursive sources of knowledge (besides perception, personal experience, etc.), also about other cultures. The possible implications of this study for metaphor theory, multimodality, and intercultural communication are discussed.