COVID-19 in English and Persian: A Cognitive Linguistic Study of Illness Metaphors across Languages

ABSTRACT

This article investigates conceptual metaphors for Covid-19 in two languages, American English and Persian, using two approaches, namely Lakoff & Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory and Kövecses’s approach to universal metaphors. The data for the analysis were drawn from a large corpus of Covid-19 metaphors in American English and a smaller corpus extracted from major news websites in Persian. The analysis focuses on examining the source domains for the conceptual metaphors used and describe the most common conceptual metaphors. We discuss systematic similarities and differences between the two languages regarding the way Covid-19 is talked about and conceptualized and highlight some novel conceptual metaphors that only appear in Persian.

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our immense gratitude to the editors, Brigitte Nerlich and Martin Döring, for their insightful comments on the manuscript, which substantially benefitted our revision and shaped the final version of the article.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

¹ In this study, Persian/Iranian culture is deemed to be a set of models, frames or schemas shared by Iranians in the post-revolutionary era of Iran.

² We should note that the corpus is not exclusively limited to American news sources, but to find American English metaphors we collected the data form American sources.

³ It is readily accessible through https://www.english-corpora.org/corona/

⁴ Magazine/news websites used for this study are: Boston Herald, Buzz Feed News, CBS News, CNBC, Crooks and Liars, Daily Herald, Deadline, Doctor NDTV, Houston Chronicle, Journal Star, Los Angeles Times, Marion Star, Market Watch, MSN, NBC Sport, Politico, Press Release Point, Project Syndicate, RT News, Sun Journal, The Dalas Morning News, The Hill, The New York Times, The Ringer, Washington Times, Yahoo

⁵ We examined 19 different newspapers/news websites using the search terms “ and ‘19 , which are used in Persian instead of “coronavirus” or ‘Covid-19ʹ, which are: Iran, Sharq, Keyhan, Armane Melli, Jame Jam, Etemad, Qods, Javan, Resalat, Tejarat, Shahrvand, Ebtekar, Hamshahri, Vatane Emrouz, Setare Sobh, Mostaqel, Isna, Borna, and Rasa News Agency.

⁶ In this study, homogeneity means the similarity between the register of data.

⁷ As it was impossible to survey all American news sources for this article, we used a readily available corpus of coronavirus metaphors to supplement what we had found in our initial findings. Using this corpus, we were able to expedite the process of finding metaphors. This approach also yielded more reliable data and made us more confident about the representative state of our findings. Finally, sometimes news sources demonstrate a bias toward an issue, whereas the use of this corpus can eliminate this effect by providing large datasets.

⁸ One should note that, in this study, we tried to make sure that all corpus-derived metaphors and illustrative examples were originally from American sources.

⁹ EZ is the commonly used abbreviation for a Persian construction named “ezɑfe”, in which two nouns or a noun and an adjective are conjoined by means of the insertion of the mid, front vowel “e”.