‘Just Like Pandemic Prevention’: The Semiotic Flow That Interweaves Multimodality, Metaphor, and Narrativity

ABSTRACT

This study investigates how COVID-19 advice is creatively delivered in a one-minute video produced by the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control in February 2022. It examines metaphors in verbal, visual, and multimodal modes, and illustrates how such metaphors interact with multimodal narrativity. Drawing on the insights of studies on multimodal metaphors, this paper seeks to identify which are the most pervasive metaphors or what dominant metaphor, if any, is used in the video. It finds that the metaphorical mappings between coping with the covid pandemic and handling olympic weightlifting are represented across modes and that the creative delivery of COVID-19 advice is woven from a warp of metaphors in various modes and a weft of narrativity across modes. Such metaphorical creativity is underpinned by the semiotic flow that features four interconnected configurations: moving between metaphorization, literalization, and re-metaphorization; somehow blurring the source-target boundary; expanding the range of functions that the multimodal representation can serve; and initiating a metaphorical thought from one or more contextual factors.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to National Science and Technology Council, Taiwan, for its support (MOST 111-2410-H-110-042). I am also grateful to two anonymous reviewers and editor Herbert Colston for their constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ The video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLxdZf2rvG0.

² For a complete transcript of the speaker’s talk, see Appendix.

³ All Chinese punctuation marks have been added by the author to increase readability and fluency. English punctuation is used in the translation where necessary.

⁴ The facemask can be seen in more detail at https://urlis.net/e4s9r9nc.

⁵ The facemask can be seen in more detail at https://urlis.net/e4s9r9nc.

⁶ The two other videos are accessible at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBSeMJ–Ylk and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3eS0umTw2o.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Taiwan National Science and Technology Council under Grant number MOST 111-2410-H-110-042.