Framing the 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic: Metaphors, Images and Symbols

In December 2019, 18 years after the outbreak of SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) (see Wallis & Nerlich, 2005), a new SARS-like virus began to circulate and rapidly spread in the People's Republic of China. On 12th January 2020, the scientific committee of the World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed that a novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2, had caused a new respiratory illness. Against this background and in view of the rapid international spread of the virus beyond China, the Chinese government imposed a “lockdown” on Wuhan – the assumed place of origin of the virus – on 23rd January with the aim to stop its spread. On 30th January, the WHO declared the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, while on February 11th 2020, the new respiratory disease received its official name COVID-19 (also Covid19 or just covid) and was recognized as a pandemic on 11th March 2020 (Zinn, 2021). The Chinese lockdown in Wuhan did not stop or even contain the spread of COVID-19, leading to worldwide lockdowns, confinements, and the imposition of barriers, either at national, regional, or even local levels.

One country after another went into “lockdown,” some closed borders, almost all implemented public health measures such as social distancing (Venkatesh & Edirappuli, 2020), self-isolation (Bland et al., 2021), or quarantine (De Lima et al., 2020; Nerlich & Jaspal, 2021), and some, belatedly, introduced the wearing of masks in order to contain and control COVID-19. For many people, it became impossible to go about their normal life, and since then, the pandemic has left vestiges on people’s minds, while also causing, and even more so, highlighting existing severe social, economic, and political problems (Chu, Alam, Larson, & Lin, 2020).

In the midst of this turmoil, and a day after the United Kingdom went into its first lockdown on 16th March 2020, the science writer Philip Ball wrote an article entitled “Shot of hope: inside the race for a coronavirus vaccine” (Ball, 2020). A year later, the so-called race has been “won,” not by a single vaccine but by numerous vaccines, the result of tremendous scientific and industrial cooperation across the globe. As a result, millions of people have been vaccinated, mostly in the rich countries of the Global North, while countries in the Global South have been struggling for access to vaccines. Vaccination efforts are continuing now in a race against the emergence of new variants of the virus. Despite all the scientific, social, and political efforts, millions of people have died world-wide and many more will continue to do so, especially in those countries that do not have access to vaccines and if no global vaccine equity will be implemented soon (Krishel & Malpani, 2021).

The “war” of governments, people, and whole societies against the coronavirus is still ongoing and is waged with public health “weapons” such as distancing, isolation, or the wearing of medical masks. They all represent one part of the non-pharmaceutical “armour,” while the basic pharmaceutical “weapon” vaccination is the most efficient and “protective shield” against the ongoing “attacks” of newly emerging Covid-19 mutations. Human relations have also been “affected” by the pandemic: the sociocultural practices and cultural routines in space and place underwent considerable change in the context of social distancing and distorted, for example, cultural temporalities, while, on the other hand, new sociable spaces were discovered (Metha, 2020).

The languages we speak have changed as well. In English, for example, neologisms have been coined, from “covidiot” to “vaxxie” (selfie taken while being vaccinated), but, most importantly, new and well-known metaphors have emerged in the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. As readers might have noticed, we as linguists have explicitly cited – and sometimes – unconsciously used metaphors here to describe the pandemic. Metaphors are everywhere during this pandemic, and in this special issue we will trace the emergence, spread, and impact of some of them. As you will see in the following papers and the research that is currently being undertaken by other colleagues, the language of Covid-19 is full of metaphors: it is replete with metaphorical patterns. This imagery contributes to generating social and political meanings that may influence and most probably lay the dynamic foundation for conceptualizing the way in which we deal and live with COVID-19 for many years into the future.

In this special and interdisciplinary issue, the authors deal with the emergence of metaphors in various cultural, social, political, and institutional contexts. The contributions display, on the one hand, the creativity inherent in various languages and social groups, while, on the other hand, comparisons between various languages shed light on converging and diverging conceptualizations of issues revolving around the coronavirus. Furthermore, all articles contribute in their different theoretical, methodological, and empirical ways to developing themes in cognitive linguistics and metaphor theory. More importantly though, they also demonstrate the relevance and potentials of applied metaphor analyses to reveal the ways in which a whole range of the social actors engage with Covid-19, a disease that has killed millions of people world-wide, caused huge distress, and considerably changed the way we live in the world, talk about the world, and think about the world.

The special issue starts with an article written by Mike Hanne that focuses on a central metaphor that structured this thinking and talking world-wide, namely the war metaphor. Unlike most articles published on this matter, Hanne wants to show readers not only how this metaphor works and what this metaphor does but also, perhaps more importantly, how to “escape capture by the war metaphor for Covid-19”. He presents a very detailed dissection of war metaphors, reveals their ideological roots and impacts on disease management, with a focus on their use by two political leaders, the then President of the United States, Donald Trump, and the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson. Hanne furthermore explores a plethora of alternative metaphors from fires to journeys and from floods to rally driving with the devil, including their local resonances and impacts on the framing of the pandemic. Finally, he examines modes and metaphors of “post-war” recovery and lessons learned, with an emphasis on social inequalities, racism, and ecological emergencies, which will still be there once the war on the virus is over. His pledge to use ecologically inspired metaphors that highlight empathy, interdependence, equity, and resilience, and not war, provides a pointer for the critical reconceptualization of the prevailing metaphorical framing of COVID-19.

Early on during the pandemic, when war metaphors were in widespread use, as Hanne showed, five linguists, Paula Perez Sobrino, Elena Semino, Iraide Ibarretxe Antuñano, Veronika Koller, and Inés Olza, initiated a crowd-sourced repository of alternative metaphors called #ReframeCovid. This initiative developed into a large database of creative, sometimes multimodal, and also multi-cultural, metaphors that is thoroughly analyzed in their article entitled “Acting like a hedgehog in times of pandemic: Metaphorical creativity in the #ReframeCovid collection.” More than 550 metaphors were found in over 30 languages during the first 6 months of the pandemic. They draw on a wide range of genres and modes, with verbal, visual, and multimodal examples displaying distinctive patterns of creativity. The findings are very interesting and shed light on the interactions between conceptual, discursive, and visual modes of creativity, thus contributing strongly to research into multi-modal metaphor use. Moreover, the study represents the first metaphor study based on a crowd-sourced dataset, which, itself, is rather creative.

Britta Brugman, Ellen Droog, Gudrung Reijnierse, Saskia Leymann, Guilia Frezza, and Kiki Renardel de Lavalette empirically investigate in their paper the source domains of metaphors in various languages and ask the question of how the metaphors used resonate with the respective members of the public. Their paper on “Audience perceptions of Covid-19 metaphors: The role of source domain and country context” shows that there are some culture-specific perceptions and evaluations of metaphors while there are at the same time more general ways of metaphorically framing the pandemic. The methodologically mixed design of their study deals with German, Italian and Dutch participants and asked them to express their perceptions of various Covid-19 metaphors in terms of liking, aptness, complexity, conventionality, and credibility. This fascinating study reveals that the perception of metaphors differs between the source domains and the country contexts and hence indicates that the experience with or of the culturally established target domains are an important variable in the perception of metaphors and the framing of social issues or problems.

While Hanne’s article focused on the misguided use of war metaphors by some world leaders during the early onset of the pandemic, Andreas Musolff’s article “World-beating” pandemic responses: Ironical, sarcastic, and satirical metaphor use in the context of COVID-19 pandemic” homes in on another type of language adopted by some of them, namely their hyperbolic claims of “world-leading” interventions. He shows how their metaphorical framings were satirically turned back on them. The paper thus reveals in detail the counter-implications triggered by the implied dissociation from hyperbolic promises. This procedure leads him to tease out several types of implied dissociation, i.e., doubting the figurative claims’ implicatures (irony), decrying their rationality (sarcasm), and exposing their absurdity (satire), with reference to diverse models of irony (e.g., echo, pretense, defaultness, conceptual blending). This intriguing paper therefore weaves together a number of theoretical strands in research dealing with metaphor, hyperbole, and irony/sarcasm and applies them in an empirical study focused on political responses to Covid-19.

The response to Covid-19 has been defined by public health measures intended to contain and mitigate, if not eliminate, the Covid-19. Containment brings with it a curtailment of movement and journeys and the erection of barriers and boundaries, both real and metaphorical. David Gurnham’s article entitled ‘”Our country is a freedom-loving county”’: the spreading of the virus as metaphor for “people on the move’ focuses on movement metaphors swirling around the pandemic and traces this metaphorical frame of reference across a range of different kinds of responses to Covid-19 – namely legal texts and poetry. While movement metaphors have been studied in the context of infectious diseases before (Nerlich, Brown, & Wright, 2009), issues of fairness and social justice – the focus of Gurnham’s paper – related to that metaphor have not. And while policy and poetry have also been studied before in the context of infectious diseases (Döring, 2009; Nerlich & Döring, 2005), this has not happened yet in the context of Covid-19. Both the official legal documents and the experience-based poetry studied here emerged during the first wave of the pandemic in the UK and therefore share similar reference points. Gurnham’s very interesting analysis shows how the literal movement of the virus and of people, as well as the bodily experiences of physical motion and constraint form the cognitive basis for metaphors for social justice and fairness.

The contribution of Esranur Efeoğlu-Özcan in turn reveals the role of metaphor in the political discourse in Turkey. She investigates in her paper “Pull the weeds out or perish: Using the pandemic metaphors to foster in-group unity and solidarity in Turkish political discourse” the ideological entailments inherent in the metaphors of 141 political Tweets. Her thought-provoking study shows that specific argumentation schemes are politically used as a discursive strategy to corroborate and foster the self-presentation of politicians while at the same time shared representations of a common Turkish identity are developed. Thus, the outbreak of Covid-19 and the metaphors structuring it, as she shows, use familiar patterns of cultural experience rooted in cultural and religious presuppositions. This procedure creates a symbolic reservoir to subtly convey messages of unity typical for nationalist discourse while also indicating who is supposedly not part of the nation.

Comparative studies of the use of pandemic metaphors between different languages stemming from various language families are still scarce. The topic is, luckily, addressed here by Reza Kazemian and Somayeh Hatamzadeh in their paper entitled “Covid-19 in English and Persian: A cognitive linguistics study of illness metaphors across languages.” Their systematic and intercultural study of media-metaphors used in Iranian and American newspaper coverage investigates the conceptual metaphors structuring the news discourse. The detailed and exciting analysis of source domains and the respective characterization of most common conceptual metaphors uncovers the implications hidden in the linguistic metaphors analyzed and opens up exciting insights on diverging and converging framings between the two languages and cultures. Of particular interest are some novel metaphors that only appear in Persian as they convey novel ways of framing Covid-19 – at least to people in the West.

And finally, the contribution by Cun Zhang, Zhengjun Lin, and Shengxi Jin turns to China, where our story began: Their article “What else besides war: Deliberate metaphors framing Covid-19 in Chinese online newspaper editorials” conveys novel and highly relevant insights into the way Chinese online newspaper editorials framed the pandemic metaphorically. The data were collected in the first few months of the pandemic and show that three metaphorical framings prevailed at the time, namely, season metaphors, disease and medicine metaphors, and homework metaphors. All three metaphorical framings resonate with specific aspects and implications of Chinese culture, providing a shared socio-cultural background for creating a common understanding of the virus and the policies enacted to deal with it.

In summary, we as editors hope that this special issue on the metaphorical framing of the Covid-19 pandemic provides an empirically interesting, methodologically stimulating and theoretically exciting read. We started this project in April 2020 and since then, the pandemic itself and the language revolving around it has moved forward in unexpected ways. Hence, the collection of articles published here represents a first snapshot taken at the start of the pandemic. We know and hope that further research will reveal the metaphorical, metonymic, and symbolic complexities of Covid-19 that is not only a natural but even more so a cultural phenomenon that deserves further inspection and research to develop socially grounded strategies for dealing and coping with the pandemic. These have to be different and multifaceted, as we have seen here. Last but not least, we would like to thank “our” – and we mean it in this emotional way! – authors from the bottom of our hearts. Thanks a lot for great research, for sticking with the sometimes complicated review process and for being so sympathetic throughout the whole process.

This special issue is dedicated to all those who have suffered heartbreak and loss during this pandemic brought about by a novel coronavirus. We cannot relieve the pain you went through, but we want to acknowledge that we see you and care – in our very linguistic ways. Together we stand!

Martin Döring and Brigitte Nerlich, autumn 2021

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have any relevant financial or non-financial competing interests.