COVID-19 IS WAR, WATER & A PERSON: Metaphorical Language of the Coronavirus Disease in "the Jordan Times" Newspaper

Abstract

Metaphors permeate our daily communication, and they are part of our cognition. The present study investigates metaphors in a corpus-based study during the Coronavirus disease 19 crisis (COVID-19) using the Antconc Software. The way written media discourse framed the COVID-19 Crisis, especially in the Middle East received little attention from discourse analysts. The data include news editorials about the Coronavirus disease 19 from April 1, 2020 to July 5, 2020 collected from "the Jordan Times" Newspaper in English. The metaphors will be analysed according to Lakoff and Johnson's (1980; 2003) perspective of Conceptual Metaphors and Charteris-Black (2004) of Critical Metaphor Analysis. The quantitative analysis shows that the conceptual metaphors COVID-19 IS WAR, COVID-19 IS WATER, and COVID-19 IS A PERSON are highly used in the corpus to frame the pandemic. The conceptual metaphor COVID-19 IS WAR is not only used to represent a war against the disease, but also a war between countries. So, the metaphorical use is politicised, and reflects hidden ideology. The quantitative analysis asserts that the context is the decisive factor for the analysis of certain lexical items related to the pandemic and identifying whether they are literally or metaphorically used.