Abstract
The research considers the COVID-19 pandemic cognitive metaphors conveyed by means of the English language in business news. The interpretation of metaphor goes beyond its traditional understanding as a rhetorical device. The approach is consistent with a cognitive theory claiming that metaphor is a mental instrument to reflect the way we reason and imagine the world. The paper provides a brief theoretical framework of the research, discusses the concept, role and types of cognitive metaphor. It deals with particular cases of metaphoric representations of the pandemic selected fromThe Financial Times, an international daily with focus on business and economic affairs. The results of the study reveal a variety of lexical means to express the dynamic image of the pandemic that exhibits a gradual shift from the military metaphor to variant interpretations. The findings prove the pervasiveness of metaphor in business and mass media communication, its significance to understand difficult situations, efficiently communicate ideas and influence the audience.
Highlights
The outbreak and consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic will leave a deep mark in the consciousness of people all over the world
The studies with a focus on applied linguistics perspective were carried out to discover and explain new coinage related to Covid-19 situation, its influence on other languages and problems arising in the translation and coordination of terminology [9,10,11], generate taxonomies of terms with the help of corpus analysis and estimate word frequencies [12,13,14], collect and systematize massive Covid-19 related text data [15]
The world is seen as a war zone where people are fighting with the disease: “Europe battles to contain surge in Covid-19 cases” (FT, 29 July 2020), “...countries fight Covid-19 resurgence” (FT, 25 Dec 2020), “We need to aggressively stop the spread ” (FT, 5 Dec 2020), “hospitals and intensive care units are struggling to cope.” (FT, 21 March 21 2020)
Summary
The outbreak and consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic will leave a deep mark in the consciousness of people all over the world. Rapid pace and global scale, the pandemic has forced significant changes into our lives. Under such circumstances, immediate response, and efficient prevention have become the greatest challenges faced by the world community. There exists a sizable academic literature discussing linguistic and communicative aspects of the pandemic crisis [6,7,8], addressing the ongoing events, tackling cognitive and emotional response to the unpredictable circumstances, and explaining how coronavirus outbreak communication is being handled by political, mass media and scientific communities. The findings revealed an unprecedented and rapid (within 3 months) growth in the frequency of pandemicrelated words (coronavirus, corona, COVID-19) compared to lexical items connected with recent political and social events (Brexit, impeachment) [13]. Affixation, compounding, abbreviation, clipping and conversion prevailed over other word-building processes
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