ABSTRACT

The Covid-19 pandemic has had a great impact on the life of every inhabitant of the planet. During 2020 and 2021 a significant amount of work on how the pandemic is being conceptualized and communicated has been done. Most work has focused on the role of metaphor in the construal of specific cognitive frames. In this paper, we turn to a similar but different conceptualization mechanism, i.e. simile. Drawing from recent socio-cognitive and discursive empirical approaches to similes, this paper focuses on “target is like source” constructions in English and Spanish containing (corona)virus either as target or source of the simile. The analysis is based on 200 examples found in the digital media during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020. First, the constructions, conceptualizations and mappings are analyzed. Second, the relevant discourse features (genre type, relation to subjectivity, text location and structuring properties) are described. Finally, the cross-linguistic English-Spanish analysis shows that, despite the many coincidences in both datasets, there are different tendencies as for the use of culture-specific mappings and the genres where the similes occur in. The study aims at testing to what extent the general features characterizing similes also hold in the case of (corona)virus, both as source and as target. The corpus analysis contributes, in addition, to the emerging line of research on the use of figuration in the communication of the pandemic, as well as to the study of the discursive dimensions of similes in real settings.

摘要

Covid-19 大流行对地球上每个居民的生活产生了巨大影响。在 2020 年和 2021 年期间，已经完成了大量关于如何对大流行进行概念化和传播的工作。大多数工作都集中在隐喻在特定认知框架的解释中的作用。在本文中，我们转向一种相似但不同的概念化机制，即明喻。借鉴最近对明​​喻的社会认知和话语实证方法，本文重点研究包含（冠状）病毒的英语和西班牙语中的“ target is like source ”结构作为明喻的目标或来源。该分析基于 2020 年第一波大流行期间在数字媒体中发现的 200 个示例。首先，分析了结构、概念化和映射。其次，描述了相关的话语特征（体裁类型、与主体性的关系、文本位置和结构属性）。最后，跨语言的英语-西班牙语分析表明，尽管两个数据集中有许多巧合，但在使用特定文化映射和明喻出现的体裁方面存在不同的趋势。该研究旨在测试什么在（冠状）病毒的情况下，表征明喻的一般特征在多大程度上也成立，既作为源又作为目标。此外，语料库分析有助于在流行病传播中使用比喻的新兴研究路线，以及对现实环境中明喻的话语维度的研究。