A Study On The Discourse Expression And Response Of COVID-19 Vaccine Rumors From The Perspective Of Critical Metaphor

The epidemic situation of novel coronavirus is one of the most threatening infectious diseases in recent years,and vaccination of COVID-19 vaccine is considered to be the most economical and effective means of epidemic prevention and control.However,due to various reasons,varying degrees of vaccine hesitancy are prevalent in countries around the world.Some studies have found that the rumor of COVID-19 vaccine spread in social platforms is an important reason for the public’s "vaccine hesitation" and even resistance.In COVID-19 vaccine rumors,rumormakers use metaphor as a discourse strategy to convey information,attitudes,emotions,and even potential intentions,and use the pragmatic function of metaphor to subtly influence the audience’s cognition of COVID-19 vaccine.Therefore,this study intends to conduct a critical metaphor analysis of COVID-19 vaccine rumors,understand the types and use of metaphors in COVID-19 vaccine rumors,analyze how they use metaphors to complete discourse construction,and clarify the functions of metaphors in COVID-19 vaccine rumors,aiming to explore:(1)What metaphors are used in COVID-19 vaccine rumors?(2)How can rumormakers construct rumor discourse of COVID-19 vaccine through metaphor?(3)What is the discourse function of the metaphor in the rumor of COVID-19 vaccine? Through the exploration of research questions,this study will provide thinking on countermeasures to deal with health information rumors such as COVID-19 vaccine rumors.In this study,301 samples of COVID-19 vaccine rumors were collected as corpus,and they were imported into Wmatrix analysis software based on semantic domain for initial metaphor recognition by building a corpus.The results of metaphor recognition were obtained by reviewing the MIP manual recognition program,and then the COVID-19 vaccine rumors were analyzed pragmatically and socially through the steps of metaphor description and metaphor explanation.After analyzing the discourse construction of these five metaphors,this paper discusses the three pragmatic functions of metaphors,namely,interpretive function,emotional guidance function and ideological function.Finally,according to the analysis results,this paper proposes the response ideas to health information rumors such as COVID-19 vaccine rumors based on this study.First,build a rumor recognition system based on metaphor to improve the rumor recognition;Secondly,starting from metaphors,emotional governance of rumors is carried out to quell negative public emotions;The third is to eliminate metaphorical thinking in rumors and rectify the root cause;The fourth is to use metaphor as a lever to discover the hidden ideological risks in rumors.This study takes COVID-19 vaccine rumors as the research object,which enriches the research of critical metaphor analysis on COVID-19 vaccine rumors and other health information rumors.In addition,this study also provides some enlightenment for the governance of health information rumors such as COVID-19 vaccine rumors from the perspective of metaphor.