As other crises before, the COVID-19 pandemic put established discursive routines at stake. By framing the pandemic as a crisis, an immediate search for adequate counter-measures started to define proper means of mitigation and protection for the population. In the early stages of COVID-19, when little reliable information on the virus and its transmission behaviour was available, an intense use of metaphor to explain and govern the crisis had to be expected. Beside its well-known impact on (geo-)politics, a thorough analysis especially of the use of spatial metaphors to reason about the crises is still missing. In our approach, we rely on the foundational work of Lakoff and Johnson (1980) on image schemata, and prior work on spatial metaphors as part of argumentation patterns from cultural geography (Schlottmann, 2008). After a thorough analysis of prominent examples according to the argumentation scheme of Toulmin (1976 [1958]), we explored examples from the pre-existing corpus on COVID-19, deliberately compiled by DWDS for analysis of language patterns used throughout the pandemic. In a subsequent filter-refinement approach building on methods from cognitive linguistics and utilising a chunk of the same corpus, we were able to obtain and discuss results on the variety of spatial metaphors used at that time.

与之前的其他危机一样，COVID-19 大流行将既定的话语惯例置于危险之中。通过将大流行定性为一场危机，立即寻找适当的应对措施开始为人口确定适当的缓解和保护手段。在 COVID-19 的早期阶段，当几乎没有关于病毒及其传播行为的可靠信息时，就不得不大量使用隐喻来解释和管理危机。除了它对（地缘）政治的众所周知的影响之外，还缺少对使用空间隐喻来推理危机的透彻分析。在我们的方法中，我们依赖 Lakoff 和 Johnson (1980) 关于图像图式的基础工作，以及之前关于空间隐喻的工作作为文化地理学论证模式的一部分 (Schlottmann, 2008)。在根据 Toulmin (1976 [1958]) 的论证方案对突出示例进行全面分析后，我们探索了 COVID-19 上现有语料库中的示例，这些示例由 DWDS 特意编译，用于分析整个大流行期间使用的语言模式。在基于认知语言学方法并利用同一语料库的后续过滤器优化方法中，我们能够获得并讨论当时使用的各种空间隐喻的结果。