Like a Virus. Similes for a Pandemic

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.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ We want to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. This study has been carried out under the grant “Polarization and Digital Discourses: Critical and Socio-Cognitive perspectives” (PODDS, PID2020119102RB-I00) funded by Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, MCIN).

² Also, within this last line of research we find recent monographs on Covid-19 studies, such as Discurso y Sociedad 15(1), 2021 (http://www.dissoc.org/ediciones/v15n01/) or Breeze, Musolff, and Villar-Lich (in press).

³ This perspective is in line with a very recent paper by Tay (2021), which deals with two parallel metaphors relating the anti-government protests in Hong Kong with the pandemic, namely covid-19 is the social unrest and social unrest is covid-19. Following a socio-culturally situated approach, Tay analyses the preference or aptness of the metaphors implying source-target reversal. Results prove that metaphor aptness is linked to contextual factors such as the perception of structural similarity between the crises, as well as Hongkongers’ personal experiences with both crises.

⁴ The observations include information about the positive or neutral character of the simile, which is seldom the case (only 5 cases in English and 6 in Spanish), specific topics (such as religion, science, sports or economy), alternation with metaphors or other relevant features.

⁵ See Tversky (1977), Glucksberg and Keysar (1990), Addison (1993), for instance.

⁶ As Johnson (1981, p. 7–8) and Roncero et al. (2021, p. 85) point out, the idea that similes and metaphors are variants of the same mechanism can be traced back to Aristotle and Cicero.

⁷ The formal and conceptual complexity of similes has also been related to the iconic principles of quantity and proximity/distance (Romano, 2017).

⁸ This issue is certainly not settled within the scientific community as the same research group (Ashby, Roncero, de Almeida, & Agauas, 2018) in another empirical study based on evidence from eye movements argue that similes are easier to interpret than metaphors.

⁹ Similes have been compared to grammatical constructions as they are complex compositional linguistic forms which involve the combination of both formal and semantic information (Croft & Cruse, 2004; Dancygier & Sweetser, 2014; Moder, 2012).

¹⁰ The italics in the examples are ours. They highlight the aspects in each example that are more relevant according to the current explanation.

¹¹ A collective initiative launched in March 2020 worldwide to promote non-war-related language on Covid-19 (https://sites.google.com/view/reframecovid/initiative).

¹² Interestingly, some of the examples highlighted in Semino (2021) and Pérez-Sobrino et al. (in press) or even in the #ReframeCovid project are similes rather than metaphors, as they include expressions such as “are similar to”, “like” or “likens”.

¹³ Table 1 organizes the genres along an axiological cline from more subjective to more objective. It is worth noting that the classification of the texts has been sometimes difficult to delimit as some discursive features overlap. For instance, some news summarize interviews by means of successive instances of reported speech. Even though this text type does not follow the discursive features of prototypical-first person “interviews”, it has been considered as a type of interview. Similarly, some news mix facts with opinion. This is especially the case when experts write or talk about controversial topics. These cases have been categorized as news.

¹⁴ Three cases in English and one in Spanish do not include the simile in the headline but a metaphor or an expression that is a direct variant of the simile included in the body.

¹⁵ Some of the similes are identical or almost identical in English and Spanish, which shows the impact of globalization on figurative language. This is the case, e.g., of “Corona is like your wife. Initially you tried to control it, then you realize that you can’t. Then you learn to live with it” (EN11) and “El coronavirus es como una esposa con la que uno finalmente se acostumbra a vivir tras haber intentado hacerle cambiar” [Coronavirus is like a wife who you finally get used to live with after trying to make her change] (SP28).”

¹⁶ 2020 version can be watched at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wMVFMDIT40.