Covid-19 in Metaphors: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Italian and English Newspaper Articles

The crisis caused by Covid-19 has been largely communicated in terms of metaphors, which
allow to describe an abstract or novel concept (target domain) in terms of a more concrete and
familiar one (source domain). This study aims to analyze comparatively metaphors used to refer
to Covid-19 in a collection of articles published in March 2020 by two newspapers, the Italian
La Repubblica and the British The Guardian, in order to identify similarities or differences be
tween the two languages. Following a corpus-based approach, the articles have been archived in
two separate monolingual corpora and studied using an online tool for text analysis. The meta
phorical expressions retrieved have been compared and categorized according to the semantic
fields to which the source domains belong, and subsequently organized in domain shifts. The
results show that the newspapers framed the same period of the pandemic in similar ways, with
a prevalence of war metaphors.