Metaphoric Framing of COVID-19

The article examines the linguistic relevance of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. It describes the emergence of a new type of discourse shaped by COVID-19 and revolving around it. The article lists the main discursive trends that are related to the pandemic. The first of them is the dominance of COVID-19 in public discourses of all types, including politics, economy, culture, sport, and entertainment. Another trend is the unprecedented medicalization of everyday communication, with medical terms actively appropriated and modified to describe the new reality. At the same time, the pandemic has spurred grassroots discursive activity by necessitating the coinage of certain units, collocations and phrases that convey the unique experience of self-isolation, social distancing, and ubiquitous online interaction. However, the most striking trend is the competition between different metaphoric scenarios of COVID-19 that can be observed in the media. The research is based on the concept of discursive construal which implies that discourses do not merely reflect reality, but actively create it imposing a certain mode of perception and shaping a certain kind of attitude. A particularly important instrument of discursive construal is metaphor, which can act as a framing device by serving as a linguistic packaging cue and containing important conceptual content at the same time. The choice of metaphoric framing is often accounted for by ideological purposes and helps to achieve the desired manipulative effect. As any situation can be framed in different ways, metaphors often compete within the same discursive space giving it a special type of dynamics, when some metaphors are being actively promoted while others are being pushed to the margins. The analysis of English-medium newspapers shows that the first framing to occur was military, the war metaphors actively used and promoted by influential politicians, including Queen Elizabeth II, Boris Johnson, and Donald Trump. The situation was explicitly described as a battle, with doctors fighting at the forefront. However, this traditional framing was vigorously opposed by clinicians, patients, and discourse specialists, who pointed out that the war metaphor was both unnecessarily aggressive and semantically inadequate as in the current pandemic people are required to isolate themselves and be idle rather than be active fighters against the new disease. Alternative solutions include journey, natural cataclysm, puzzle, and zoological metaphors, as well as highly creative framings, based on technical and metaphysical imagery. As the article shows, experimentation with metaphorical framing has turned into an intellectual game, involving thousands of enthusiasts and enabling them to evince remarkable conceptual and verbal creativity.

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