The The Conceptualization of COVID-19 in English and Kurdish Online Newspaper Articles: A Cognitive Semantic Approach

Abstract

        One of the principles of cognitive linguistics and cognitive semantics is that human language is metaphorical in nature and meaning does not only reside in the linguistic items but also in the language users’ conceptualizations against the situations and events. Metaphor is one means of conceptualization. The cognitive semantic theory of metaphors is known as Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory. According to this theory, metaphor is a mental process of understanding one domain in terms of another. Based on this, the present study is an attempt to examine the ways via which the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been conceptualized in the Kurdish and English e-newspaper articles. The articles have been taken from the online English and Kurdish newspapers such as BBC, the New York Times, Rudaw, NRT, Kurdiu, Kurdistan24, and many others. It has been hypothesized that, like any other concepts, COVID-19 is metaphorically understood and its meaning does not only confine in the term. It has been concluded that this epidemic disease can be, based on the construals and perspectives the conceptualizers take, understood in terms of different concepts such as WAR, FIRE, ADVERSARY, GUEST, REVENGE, DARKNESS, JOURNEY, etc., each of which is based on the background of the subject matter of the online newspaper articles as well as culture and our experiences with COVID-19.