ABSTRACT

The need to provide novel but meaningful ways to reason and talk about an unprecedented crisis such as the Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in a surge of creative metaphoric expressions in a variety of communicative settings. In order to investigate novel ways of conceptualizing the pandemic, we consider the metaphors included in the #ReframeCovid collection, a crowdsourced dataset of metaphors for the pandemic that rely on non-war frames. Its heterogeneous makeup of multilingual and multimodal examples (to date, over 550 examples – monomodal and multimodal in 30 languages) offers a unique opportunity to explore the ways in which metaphors have been used creatively to describe different aspects of the coronavirus pandemic. The patterns of metaphor creativity discussed in this paper include: creative realizations (verbal and visual) of wide-scope mappings, the use of one-off source domains, shifts in the valence of the source domain evoked, and the exploitation of source domains that are specific to particular discourse communities. The analysis of multimodal examples contributes to our understanding of the role of metaphor in sense-making and communication at a time of an extraordinary global crisis and will also provide new insights into metaphor creativity as a multidimensional phenomenon that integrates conceptual, discursive and cultural factors.

摘要

需要提供新颖但有意义的方式来推理和谈论前所未有的危机，例如 Covid-19 大流行，导致在各种交流环境中出现大量创造性的隐喻表达。为了研究概念化大流行的新方法，我们考虑了#ReframeCovid 集合中包含的隐喻，这是一个依赖非战争框架的大流行隐喻的众包数据集。它由多语言和多模态示例组成（迄今为止，超过 550 个示例——30 种语言的单模态和多模态），为探索如何创造性地使用隐喻来描述冠状病毒大流行的不同方面提供了独特的机会。本文讨论的隐喻创造力模式包括：广泛的映射、一次性源域的使用、引发的源域价的变化以及对特定话语社区的源域的利用。对多模态例子的分析有助于我们理解隐喻在全球危机时期在意义构建和交流中的作用，也将为隐喻创造力作为一种整合概念、话语和文化因素的多维现象提供新的见解。