It’s Like Being Hit by a Tsunami: The use of the natural force Metaphor for Conceptualising the COVID-19 Pandemic in English and Serbian

Abstract

Many different metaphors have been used so far in public health communication to capture different aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic since they serve as an apt instrument in crisis discourse of conveying important messages to various audiences in a simple and easily understandable manner. Within the theoretical framework of Critical Metaphor Analysis

Moć I Funkcije Metafora U Pandemijskom Diskursu

“…Metaphor has been a powerful cognitive and strategic communication instrument of dominant participants in the pandemic discourse, which has already been attested by multiple studies conducted so far (e.g. Musolff et al, 2022;Nerlich, 2020;Olza et al, 2021;Semino, 2021;Silaški & Đurović, 2022aSilaški & Đurović, , 2022bWicke & Bolognesi, 2020). This paper deals with metaphors in the pandemic discourse in Serbia, which I define here as a public discourse of political elites and health experts used during 2020 and 2021 including both the primary pandemic discourse (public addresses of politicians and those of medical experts during the regular sessions of the national Crisis response team) as well as the secondary pandemic discourse (that of the media reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic).…”

“…I metafore prirodne sile pomoću kojih se prizivaju apokaliptična scenarija i stanovništvo zastrašuje katastrofičnim slikama još su jedno sredstvo ulivanja i širenja straha i bespomoćnosti u pandemijskom diskursu, pogotovo u onom sekundarnom, novinskom, gde dolazi do izražaja sasvim drugačiji razlog za pribegavanje metaforama -potreba za bombastičnim i senzacionalističkim izveštavanjem, čemu su građani bili podvrgnuti tokom najvećeg dela trajanja pandemije, što se pokazuje u sledećim primerima: Izgleda, međutim, da je ipak metafora prirodne sile predstavljala najsnažniji instrument afektivne manipulacije jer je u stanju da, zahvaljujući sposobnosti selektivnog isticanja i prikrivanja određenih aspekata pojava, akcentuje opasnost, strah i neizvesnost koji potiču od virusa i zaraze. Istovremeno je ova metafora, ako se koristi svesno, isplanirano i namerno, efikasno sredstvo usmeravanja percepcija, mišljenja i ponašanja pripadnika javnosti u željenom smeru, i to, kako su istraživanja pokazala (Olza et al, 2021;Pérez-Sobrino et al, 2022;Silaški & Đurović, 2011), nezavisno od jezika ili kulture u kojoj se produkuje krizni diskurs. Ona je, između ostalog, omogućila političkim elitama stvaranje kolektivne iluzije da je pandemija proizvod sile koju je nemoguće kontrolisati i zauzdati, van moći onih koji su zaduženi za donošenje najcelishodnijih odluka.…”

The explanatory function of metaphor scenario in the Serbian pro-vaccine discourse

“…Even a brief look at media texts in the three-year period to come shows that the pandemic has also been heavily metaphorically represented. A number of studies investigating the metaphorical conceptualization of Covid-19 and its portrayal in various types of the media (Ervas et al 2020, Pérez-Sobrino et al 2022, Semino 2021, Silaški 2023, Silaški & Đurović 2022a, 2022b) carry important implications for the issue of simplifying scientific Covid-19 discourse.…”

“…A "lexical unit" refers not only to individual words but also to multiword expressions(Semino 2008: 12). 3 This process was also informed by the procedure for identifying linguistic metaphors in Serbian(Bogetić, Broćić & Rasulić 2019), as Serbian, similarly to other Slavic languages, exhibits a very complex morphological structure "with flexible word order and complex fusional inflectional morphology"(Bogetić et al 2019: 204).4 The same method of data collection and analysis has already been deployed in our previous research on metaphors in the Covid-19 discourse in Serbian(Silaški 2023, Silaški & Đurović 2022a, 2022b.…”

COVID-19 Conceptual Metaphors in Indonesian Newspapers

“…Investigation of conceptual metaphors related to the COVID-19 pandemic in news media is abundant, such as done by Silaški and Đurović (2022) Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and then reinforced by Kovecses (2010). In CMT, conceptual metaphors are seen as a process of comprehending one concept or area of experience in terms of another, that is a series of correspondences between two conceptual domains, known as the source and target domains (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 2003.…”