#3922. Where Covid metaphors come from: reconsidering context and modality in metaphor

September 2026publication date
Proposal available till 15-05-2025
4 total number of authors per manuscript0 $

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Journal’s subject area:
Cultural Studies;
Language and Linguistics;
Linguistics and Language;
Communication;
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Abstract:
Pandemics such as Covid-19 are often described in terms of “wars” or “waves” and “troughs.” Yet, the rarely asked question is: Where do Covid-19 metaphors come from? I argue that for context-induced creativity to be fully appreciated we need to move beyond verbal metaphors, or verbal manifestations of metaphor, and consider factors that commonly produce creative multimodal metaphors. In this article, I will limit myself to the discussion of six motivational forces or contextual factors (in no order of importance): (1) the immediate physical environment, (2) the immediate cultural context, (3) the immediate social setting, (4) knowledge about the major elements participating in the discourse, (5) physical resemblance between the source and target concepts, and (6) word plays and literalizations of famous proverbs and idioms in a language. It is argued that these kinds of context, albeit involved in discourse production and comprehension, do not control discourse as cognitive context models do.
Keywords:
context models; context-induced metaphor; covid-19; metaphor variation; Multimodal creativity; social-cultural cognition

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