Metaphorical Traits of the Language of the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Short-Term Diachronic Study

Studies examining the language of the pandemic include those focused on address terms and of stance-taking (Yingnian Tao, “Address Term and of Stance-Taking in the Discussion of Wuhan Diary in Weibo.” #cads2020. Corpora & Discourse. Book of Abstracts [2020]: 116), also the use of Twitter for administering advice in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, or how Covid-19 has been addressed in research articles (Luke Collins and Veronica Koller, Viral Language: Analysing the Covid-19 Pandemic Public Discourse. London: Routledge, 2024). Metaphor research includes the description of metaphors used on Twitter (Philip Wicke and Marianna M. Bolognesi, “Framing COVID-19: How We Conceptualize and Discuss the Pandemic on Twitter.” PLoS One 15, no. 9 [2020]: e0240010) or chosen by politicians from different countries to discuss COVID-related issues (Collins and Koller, Viral Language). Diachronically, there are no studies examining the metaphorical traits of words denoting COVID-19 in the political setting of the UK Parliament. The present research aims to fill this gap. It is a corpus-based investigation undertaken on the Parliament Covid corpus (PCov), including parliamentary debates dating from March 2020 to September 2020. Words denoting COVID-19 have been retrieved with the concordancer WordSmithTools 6.0, and their metaphorical traits examined using the Metaphor Identification Procedure (Pragglejaz Group, “A Method for Identifying Metaphorically Used Words in Discourse.” Metaphor and Symbol 22, no. 1 [2007]: 1–39). The analysis reveals that COVID-19 is depicted as a Stable entity over time, reflecting a sense of immobility, but also as a Moving entity due to the danger experienced as a consequence of the pandemic.