Doctors and nurses in these weeks and months are busy in the trenches, fighting against a new invisible enemy: Covid-19. Cities are locked down and civilians are besieged in their own homes, to prevent the spreading of the virus. War-related terminology is commonly used to frame the discourse around epidemics and diseases. The discourse around the current epidemic makes use of war-related metaphors too, not only in public discourse and in the media, but also in the tweets written by non-experts of mass communication. We hereby present an analysis of the discourse around #Covid-19, based on a large corpus tweets posted on Twitter during March and April 2020. Using topic modelling we first analyze the topics around which the discourse can be classified. Then, we show that the WAR framing is used to talk about specific topics, such as the virus treatment, but not others, such as the effects of social distancing on the population. We then measure and compare the popularity of the WAR frame to three alternative figurative frames (MONSTER, STORM and TSU-NAMI) and a literal frame used as control (FAMILY). The results show that while the FAMILY frame covers a wider portion of the corpus, among the figurative frames WAR, a highly conventional one, is the frame used most frequently. Yet, this frame does not seem to be apt to elaborate the discourse around some aspects involved in the current situation. Therefore, we conclude, in line with previous suggestions, a plethora of framing options-or a metaphor menu-may facilitate the communication of various aspects involved in the Covid-19related discourse on the social media, and thus support civilians in the expression of their feelings, opinions and beliefs during the current pandemic.

Conceptual concreteness and categorical specificity are two continuous variables that allow distinguishing, for example, justice (low concreteness) from banana (high concreteness) and furniture (low specificity) from rocking chair (high specificity). The relation between these two variables is unclear, with some scholars suggesting that they might be highly correlated. In this study, we operationalize both variables and conduct a series of analyses on a sample of > 13,000 nouns, to investigate the relationship between them. Concreteness is operationalized by means of concreteness ratings, and specificity is operationalized as the relative position of the words in the WordNet taxonomy, which proxies this variable in the hypernym semantic relation. Findings from our studies show only a moderate correlation between concreteness and specificity. Moreover, the intersection of the two variables generates four groups of words that seem to denote qualitatively different types of concepts, which are, respectively, highly specific and highly concrete (typical concrete concepts denoting individual nouns), highly specific and highly abstract (among them many words denoting human-born creation and concepts within the social reality domains), highly generic and highly concrete (among which many mass nouns, or uncountable nouns), and highly generic and highly abstract (typical abstract concepts which are likely to be loaded with affective information, as suggested by previous literature). These results suggest that future studies should consider concreteness and specificity as two distinct dimensions of the general phenomenon called abstraction.

The words we use to talk about the current epidemiological crisis on social media can inform us on how we are conceptualizing the pandemic and how we are reacting to its development. This paper provides an extensive explorative analysis of how the discourse about Covid-19 reported on Twitter changes through time, focusing on the first wave of this pandemic. Based on an extensive corpus of tweets (produced between 20th March and 1st July 2020) first we show how the topics associated with the development of the pandemic changed through time, using topic modeling. Second, we show how the sentiment polarity of the language used in the tweets changed from a relatively positive valence during the first lockdown, toward a more negative valence in correspondence with the reopening. Third we show how the average subjectivity of the tweets increased linearly and fourth, how the popular and frequently used figurative frame of WAR changed when real riots and fights entered the discourse.

Our ability to deal with abstract concepts is one of the most intriguing faculties of human cognition. Still, we know little about how such concepts are formed, processed, and represented in mind. For example, because abstract concepts do not designate referents that can be experienced through our body, the role of perceptual experiences in shaping their content remains controversial. Current theories suggest a variety of alternative explanations to the question of "how abstract concepts are represented in the human mind." These views pinpoint specific streams of semantic information that would play a prominent role in shaping the content of abstract concepts, such as situation-based information (e.g., Barsalou & Wiemer-Hastings, ), affective information (Kousta, Vigliocco, Vinson, Andrews, & Del Campo, ), and linguistic information (Louwerse, ). Rarely, these theoretical views are directly compared. In this special issue, current views are presented in their most recent and advanced form, and directly compared and discussed in a debate, which is reported at the end of each article. As a result, new exciting questions and challenges arise. These questions and challenges, reported in this introductory article, can arguably pave the way to new empirical studies and theoretical developments on the nature of abstract concepts.

Cognitive linguistic and semiotic accounts of metaphor have addressed similar issues such as universality, conventionality, context-sensitivity, cross-cultural variation, creativity, and “multimodality.” However, cognitive linguistics and semiotics have been poor bedfellows and interactions between them have often resulted in cross-talk. This paper, which focuses on metaphors in Greek street art, aims to improve this situation by using concepts and methods from cognitive semiotics, notably the conceptual-empirical loop and methodological triangulation. In line with the cognitive semiotics paradigm, we illustrate the significance of the terminological and conceptual distinction between semiotic systems (language, gesture, and depiction) and sensory modalities (sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste). Thus, we restrict the term multimodality to the synergy of two or more different sensory modalities and introduce the notion of polysemiotic communication in the sense of the intertwined use of two or more semiotic systems. In our synthetic approach, we employ the Motivation and Sedimentation Model (MSM), which distinguishes between three interacting levels of meaning making: the embodied, the sedimented, and the situated. Consistent with this, we suggest a definition of metaphor, leading to the assertion that metaphor is a process of experiencing one thing in terms of another, giving rise to both tension and iconicity between the two “things” (meanings, experiences, concepts). By reviewing an empirical study on unisemiotic and polysemiotic metaphors in Greek street art, we show that the actual metaphorical interpretation is ultimately a matter of situated and socio-culturally-sensitive sign use and hence a dynamic and creative process in a real-life context.