Conceptual Metaphors for Covid-19 : An Analysis of Metaphors for Covid-19 in the Discourse of Political Leaders of the UK, the USA, Canada, and Australia

Abstract: Since the emergence of Covid-19 in December 2019, metaphors to talk about the pandemic have been extensively used in political discourse. This study aims to compare metaphors for Covid-19 in the discourse of political leaders of the UK, the USA, Canada, and Australia by drawing upon three conceptual metaphors found by De la Rosa (2007). The following conceptual metaphors are investigated: DISEASE IS A WAR, DISEASE IS A NATURAL FORCE, and DISEASE IS A JOURNEY. To find metaphors for Covid-19, one corpus of transcribed political discourse was compiled for each country. The corpora were then searched using lemmas of words specific to each conceptual metaphor. By drawing upon conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) instances of metaphor usage were then analyzed. The frequency results showed the natural force metaphor to be the more frequently used in the UK and Canada corpora. In contrast, no occurrences of natural force metaphors were found in the USA or Australia corpora. The war metaphor was most frequently used in the USA corpus, and in the Australia corpus, the war and journey metaphor were used at similar frequencies. The findings of this study indicate that there is a difference in both frequency and choice of conceptual metaphors between the four corpora. The analysis also suggests that different metaphors can be used for different purposes.