#3521. Reality bites: How the pandemic has begun to shape the way we, metaphorically, see the world

October 2026publication date
Proposal available till 30-05-2025
4 total number of authors per manuscript0 $

The title of the journal is available only for the authors who have already paid for
Journal’s subject area:
Language and Linguistics;
Linguistics and Language;
Communication;
Sociology and Political Science;
Places in the authors’ list:
place 1place 2place 3place 4
FreeFreeFreeFree
2350 $1200 $1050 $900 $
Contract №3521.1 Contract №3521.2 Contract №3521.3 Contract №3521.4
1 place - free (for sale)
2 place - free (for sale)
3 place - free (for sale)
4 place - free (for sale)

Abstract:
Since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, there have been thousands of articles on the use of metaphor to describe the crisis. From war and oceanic metaphors to the dreaded phrase ‘ramping up’, the language and images used by meme-makers to understand the crisis are not neutral constructs. This article, based on a large-scale corpus of political cartoons, aims to answer that question – how the pandemic itself becomes a metaphor. The sheer frequency of occurrences of CORONAVIRUS metaphors (a total of 175 out of 497 relevant multimodal cartoons, that is, more than 35%) demonstrates and makes a case for the necessity to examine the effect of context, in particular topical news and physical circumstances, in the cognitive linguistic study of creative metaphor. In short, the results provide initial evidence that new viruses and diseases such as Covid-19 have a negative and significant effect on cognition (or shape societies’ worldviews).
Keywords:
Arab culture; context; COVID-19; creative and novel metaphors; metaphsimiles; political cartoons; shadow-reflection metaphor; the coronavirus as metaphor

Contacts :
0