Comparative Analysis of the Metaphorical Frames of the Covid-19 Reports in the Pandemic and the Post-Pandemic Eras

Abstract

This study aims to conduct a comparative analysis of the metaphorical frames of the Covid-19 reports in the pandemic and the post-pandemic eras.This study adopts Python3.7 software to retrieve the relevant data of the official website of People’s Daily, and uses TF-IDF algorithm to segment the text. We find that war metaphor and architecture metaphor are the most frequently used metaphors in People’s Daily in the pandemic era and the post-pandemic era respectively. The word frequency of these two metaphors has a positive relationship with the word frequency of epidemic words during the pandemic era, while it has a significant negative relationship in the post-pandemic era. After that, we make a further analysis of the total trend of monthly word ratio of various metaphors, and find that architecture metaphor shows a significant upward trend in the post-pandemic era.