Press language infected with COVID-19. Coronavirus in metaphors

ABSTRACT

The coronavirus pandemic has changed not only the lives of people around the world, but also the language they use. This paper aims to analyse the metaphors used to describe the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the COVID-19 disease it causes. It furthermore indicates the extent to which these metaphors determine how the pandemic is portrayed in press articles. The cognitive picture of the coronavirus (or pandemic) will be presented with reference to conceptual metaphors, as these are understood by Lakoff and Johnson (2014) and Jakel (2003). The analysis considers the timeframe that starts with the outbreak of the pandemic in December 2019 and ends in March 2022, with the resulting corpus including 278 newspaper articles that were published in Spiegel and that engaged with the pandemic and the coronavirus. With this corpus as basis, the attempt is made to illustrate and analyse conceptual metaphors about the coronavirus pandemic in Germany. Title Press language infected with COVID-19. Coronavirus in metaphors