Keyword – discourse-based metaphor identification

Szabó, Lilla Petronella – Béni, Alexandra:

Virus wars

The Covid-19 pandemic posed a new challenge to the media, which needed to inform citizens about novel concepts such as the spread of the coronavirus, staying at home, or social distancing. Our research focused on how leading Hungarian news sites (24.hu, index.hu, origo.hu) communicated the Covid-19 pandemic and the measures against it during the first and the second waves of the infections in Hungary. We identified the metaphors applied in the news articles by means of the discourse dynamics approach. Metaphors are important because they show the way speakers think about concepts through the analysis of language use. Therefore, metaphors reveal the conceptual frames applied by the online media to coronavirus and the measures against the virus. Our results showed that, in line with the international trend, war metaphors (which depicted the virus as an enemy, against whom one must fight) were dominant in the observed news articles. In addition to the war rhetoric, the spread of coronavirus appeared as a ‘flood,’ and Hungary was depicted as a ‘machine.’

Keywords: coronavirus, conceptual metaphor, discourse-based metaphor identification, Covid-19, flood metaphor, machine metaphor, news portal, war rhetoric