التغيير الاجتماعي واللغوي: التعبيرات المجازية المتعلقة بـ Covid-19 باللغتين الإنجليزية والعربية

رشا عبد الرضا سعيد

doi:10.31185/eduj.Vol49.Iss1.3260

Authors

Rasha Abdulridha Saeed University of Baghdad / College of Languages/

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.31185/eduj.Vol49.Iss1.3260

Keywords:

conceptual metaphor, COVID-19, pandemic, conceptualisation, comparative, rhetoric, social media.

Abstract

Covid-19 has been conceptualised metaphorically being related to war, disaster, panic and stressful. This study is making use the Conceptual Metaphor Theory proposed by Lakoff & Johnson (1987), tackling metaphorization as a mechanism in representing and conceptualizing the fear of Coronavirus (COVID-19) and how to handle its spread. It is questionable, to what extent language users rely on metaphors in explaining their concerns towards this epidemic and what are the subjects or aspects the virus is assimilated to. It aims to seek the variant motorizations that represent this virus in English comparing them with Arabic in social media and news, depending on samples of electronic articles and posts in Arabic and English since 2020. Despite the slight variation between the two languages, it is observed that the 72 corpora are rich with covid-19 related metaphorical expressions. These conceptual metaphors are categorised into 12 themes, namely war, disaster, and climate change, mental models and emotions, what to do about the virus, person, crime, and punishment, spread, football, religion, politics, journey, and puzzle. This body of work consists of three parts: The introduction that encompasses the theoretical part which presents a review of the conceptual theory of metaphor alongside the updated theories related to it. Part two explains the research methodology that involves identifying metaphors from social media, news and articles. Then full account of findings is given. Finally, this study ends with the conclusions arrived at throughout this work.

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