Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T06:17:11.808Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Unraveling the force dynamics in conceptual metaphors of COVID-19: a multilevel analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 May 2022

Reza Kazemian Open the ORCID record for Reza Kazemian [Opens in a new window] ,
Hadaegh Rezaei Open the ORCID record for Hadaegh Rezaei [Opens in a new window]  and
Somayeh Hatamzadeh Open the ORCID record for Somayeh Hatamzadeh [Opens in a new window]
Reza Kazemian*
Affiliation:
University of Isfahan
Hadaegh Rezaei
Affiliation:
University of Isfahan
Somayeh Hatamzadeh
Affiliation:
University of Isfahan
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

So far, cognitive linguistics studies on COVID-19 have focused mainly on conceptual metaphors, paying scant attention to other construal operations such as force dynamics (FD). Adopting Kövecses’s (2020, Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio) hybrid account of conceptual metaphor and FD, this study attempts to outline an enriched cognitive view of the figurative conceptualization of illness. It also aims to answer the question: Can FD and conceptual metaphors be merged in illness metaphors, particularly corona-related ones? Research in cognitive linguistics has focused on certain source domains, such as war, fire, natural force, and wild animal, through which COVID-19 is conceptualized metaphorically. Since these metaphors feature the exchange of forces and actions, a more detailed account of these two construals could be fruitful, especially the potential force schema which underlies the detected source domains. Using an amalgamated model of conceptual metaphor theory and FD, significant associations were identified between two force-exerting elements, namely Agonist and Antagonist. These findings raise important theoretical issues that have a bearing on clarifying the correlation between illness metaphors and Talmy’s force-dynamic theory to cast some light on the complex metaphorical expressions embracing the subject under scrutiny.

Keywords

conceptual metaphorforce dynamicsforce schemaillness metaphorsCOVID-19
Type
Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , September 2022 , pp. 437 - 455
Check for updates
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abdel-Raheem, A. (2021). Reality bites: How the pandemic has begun to shape the way we, metaphorically, see the world. Discourse & Society 32(5), 519–541.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barcelona, A. (1986). On the concept of depression in American English: A cognitive approach. Rivista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 12, 7–33.Google Scholar
Brown, B., Nerlich, B., Crawford, P., Koteyko, N. & Carter, R. (2009). Hygiene and biosecurity: The language and politics of risk in an era of emerging infectious diseases. Sociology Compass 3(5), 811–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Charteris-Black, J. (2021). Metaphors of coronavirus: Invisible enemy or zombie apocalypse?. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Craig, D. (2020). Pandemic and its metaphors: Sontag revisited in the Covid-19 era. European Journal of Cultural Studies 23(6), 1025–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Croft, W., & Cruse, D. A. (2004). Cognitive linguistics. Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Csábi, S. (1998). The conceptualization of lust in English. Paper presented at the meeting of the Viennese Semiotic Society, March 26–29.Google Scholar
Dancygier, B. & Sweetser, E. (2014). Figurative language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Deignan, A. (2005). Metaphor and corpus linguistics. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fauconnier, G. (1994). Mental spaces: Aspects of meaning construction in natural language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fillmore, C. J. (1982). Frame semantics. In Linguistics Society of Korea (ed.), Linguistics in the morning calm, 111–38. Seoul: Hanshin.Google Scholar
Hampe, B. (2005). From perception to meaning. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, M. (1987). The body in the mind: The bodily basis of meaning, imagination, and reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kazemian, R. & Hatamzadeh, S. (2022). COVID-19 in English and Persian: A cognitive linguistic study of illness metaphors across languages. Metaphor and Symbol 37(2), 152–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926488.2021.1994839.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kort, S. (2017). Metaphor in media discourse: Representations of ‘Arabs’ and ‘Americans’ in American and Arab News Media. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Bristol University of West England.Google Scholar
Kӧvecses, Z. (1986). Metaphors of anger, pride, and love: A lexical approach to the structure of concepts. Amsterdam: John Benjamin.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kӧvecses, Z. (1990). Emotion concepts. New York: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kӧvecses, Z. (1991a). A linguist’s quest for love. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 8, 77–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kӧvecses, Z. (1991b). Happiness: A definitional effort. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 6, 29–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kӧvecses, Z. (1995). Anger: Its language, conceptualization, and physiology in the light of cross-cultural evidence. In Taylor, J. & MacLaury, R. E. (eds), Language and the cognitive construal of the world, 188–96. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Kövecses, Z. (2000). Metaphor and emotion. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kövecses, Z. (2003). Metaphor and emotion: Language, culture, and body in human feeling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kövecses, Z. (2020a) Emotion concepts in a new light. Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio. https://doi.org/10.4396/SFL2019I7.Google Scholar
Kövecses, Z. (2020b). Extended conceptual metaphor theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kövecses, Z. (forthcoming). Force dynamics, conceptual metaphor theory, emotion concepts. In Li, F (ed.), Handbook of Cognitive Semantics, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lakoff, G. (1993). The contemporary theory of metaphor. In Ortony, A. (ed.), Metaphor and thought, 202–51. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Langacker, R. (1987). Foundations of cognitive grammar. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Larson, B. M., Nerlich, B. & Wallis, P. (2005). Metaphors and biorisks: The war on infectious diseases and invasive species. Science Communication 26(3), 243–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nerlich, B. (2004). War on foot and mouth disease in the UK, 2001: Towards a cultural understanding of agriculture. Agriculture and Human Values 21(1), 15–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nerlich, B. (2020). Metaphors in the time of coronavirus. Making Science Public, 17 March. Available at https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/makingsciencepublic/2020/03/17/metaphors-in-the-time-of-coronavirus/ (accessed 23 March 2021).Google Scholar
Nerlich, B. & Halliday, C. (2007). Avian flu: The creation of expectations in the interplay between science and the media. Sociology of Health & Illness, 29(1), 46–65. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9566.2007.00517.x.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nerlich, B., Hamilton, C. & Rowe, V. (2002). Conceptualizing foot and mouth disease: The socio-cultural role of metaphors, frames and narratives. Metaphorik. de, 2, 90–108.Google Scholar
Nerlich, B. & Jaspal, R. (2021). Social representations of ‘social distancing ‘in response to COVID-19 in the UK media. Current Sociology 69, 566–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nerlich, B. & Koteyko, N. (2012). Crying wolf? Biosecurity and metacommunication in the context of the 2009 swine flu pandemic. Health & Place, 18(4), 710–7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2011.02.008.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Olza, I., Koller, V., Ibarretxe-Antuñano, I., Pérez-Sobrino, P. & Semino, E. (2021). The #ReframeCovid initiative: From Twitter to society via metaphor. Metaphor and the Social World 11(1), 98–120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pragglejaz Group. (2007). MIP: A method for identifying metaphorically used words in discourse. Metaphor and Symbol 22(1), 1–39. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926480709336752.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosch, E. (1978). Principles of categorization. In Rosch, E. & Lloyd, B. B. (eds), Cognition and categorization, 27–48. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Semino, E. (2021). ‘Not soldiers but fire-fighters’ – Metaphors and COVID-19. Health Communication 36(1), 50–8.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Semino, E., Demjén, Z., Demmen, J., Koller, V., Payne, S., Hardie, A. & Rayson, P. (2015). The online use of violence and journey metaphors by patients with cancer, as compared with health professionals: A mixed methods study. BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care 7(1), 60–6. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjspcare-2014-000785.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Semino, E., Demjén, Z., Hardie, A., Payne, S. & Rayson, P. (2018). Metaphor, cancer and the end of life: A corpus-based study. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Sontag, S. (1978). Illness as metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Google Scholar
Sontag, S. (1989). Illness as metaphor and AIDS and its metaphors. New York: Doubleday.Google Scholar
Sullivan, K. (2013). Frames and constructions in metaphoric language, Vol. 14. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Talmy, L. (1988). Force dynamics in language and cognition. Cognitive Science 12, 49–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Talmy, L. (2000). Toward a cognitive semantics: Concept structuring systems, Vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Wallis, P. & Nerlich, B. (2005). Disease metaphors in new epidemics: The UK media framing of the 2003 SARS epidemic. Social Science & Medicine 60(11), 2629–39.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wicke, P., Bolognesi, M. M. (2020). Framing COVID-19: How we conceptualize and discuss the pandemic on Twitter. PLoS ONE 15(9), e0240010. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0240010.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed