A Critical Metaphor Analysis Of COVID-19 Metaphor In Trump’s Tweets

Metaphor is not only a widespread linguistic phenomenon,but also a basic way of thinking for human beings.Since Lakoff and Johnson proposed the theory of conceptual metaphor,there has been an increasing number of studies related to metaphor in the academia,and one of the more prominent filed is critical metaphor analysis.Since the COVID-19 pandemic,the illness metaphors in discourse have attracted academic concern.This thesis selected Trump’s tweets after 2020 as a self-built corpus.Based on CharterisBlack’s critical metaphor analysis framework,this thesis investigated the COVID-19 metaphors in Trump’s tweets in order to analyze 1)the distribution of COVID-19 metaphors,2)meaning construction of COVID-19 metaphors,and 3)ideologies and its mechanism underlaying COVID-19 metaphors.By virtue of qualitative and quantitative methods in critical metaphor analysis of COVID-19 metaphors the finding are as follows:1)The COIVD-19 metaphors are constructed by seven types of conceptual metaphors:war metaphor,entity metaphor,disaster metaphor,traveler metaphor,water metaphor,container metaphor and fire metaphor,of which war metaphor dominates,followed by entity metaphor.And each type of conceptual metaphor highlights different secondary metaphors,which are specific and multi-sided manifestations of construction of the COVID-19 metaphors;2)Based on a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the distribution of seven types of conceptual metaphors and the proportion of secondary metaphors highlighted in each type of conceptual metaphor,we proposed a war-entity metaphor model to interpret COVID-19 metaphors.This model is based on the dichotomous war metaphor,combined with the modifier-plus-virus entity metaphor.Based on the retrieval of lexical and syntactic collocations in the war-entity metaphor model,we found that Trump constructed the dichotomy of "us" and the virus:Trump constructed external groups,for example China,as the virus and the Other through choice of modifiers and verbs;and Trump constructed the public and Trump’s government as "us" when mobilizing the public.In addition,disaster metaphor is related to Trump’s negative evaluation of the Democratic Party’s handing of the H1N1 flu,and the other four types of conceptual metaphors are related to spread of COVID19 pandemic.These five types are highly conventionalized,which account for very small percentage,so it can be assumed that construction of the COVID-19 metaphors in Trump’s tweets is realized by war-entity metaphors.3)Trump realizes otherization of external groups through arranging the mapping of source domain in war-entity metaphor.Its basis is wide used war metaphor,which can be considered as an extreme variant of the primary metaphor DIFFICULTIES ARE OPPONENTS,and war metaphor provides the original framework for the dichotomy in Trump’s tweets;while entity metaphor,part of disaster metaphor,and lexical collocation around COVID-19 metaphorical discourse provide the force for the dichotomous classification in Trump’s tweets.