Article published In:
Metaphor and the Social WorldVol. 14:1 (2024) ► pp.64–84
Military metaphors in the discourses of the pandemic in two post-Yugoslav states
Literal associations and historization of crisis
The present study contributes to the growing body of work on the pandemic-time use of the war metaphor in
public discourse, by focusing specifically on military metaphors in the media discourses of two post-Yugoslav, post-conflict
states. Using the approach of Critical Metaphor Analysis, the paper explores the discursive realizations of the war
metaphor in this context, with a particular focus on metaphor extension, metaphor entailments, and effects of earlier conflict
memory on discursive use of the metaphor. The results show how metaphor entailments may vary according to the kinds of war made
salient in discourse. Several forms of discursive use grounded in linking metaphorical and literal senses of war are identified,
as creating specific local meanings, which in the case area observed worked to relate representations of threat to dominant
instrumentalizations of historical memory and ongoing nationalist discourses. Beyond the local context, the findings are used to
discuss some aspects of pandemic-time war metaphor use important both for the theorizing of adversarial metaphors in
public discourse, and for more nuanced analyses of the discourses of crisis.
Keywords:
war metaphor, COVID-19, crisis discourse, nationalism, memory
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Background
- 3.Data and methods
- 4.Analysis
- 4.1Non-extended and extended realizations of the WAR metaphor
- 4.2Extended metaphor realizations: Interaction with literal uses of war
- 5.Discussion and conclusions
- Notes
-
References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].
References (39)
Atuhura, D. (2022). The
metaphor of war in political discourse on COVID-19 in Uganda. Frontiers in
Communication,
6
1, 297–311. 
Atanasova, D., & Koteyko, N. (2017). Metaphors
in Guardian Online and Mail Online opinion-page content on climate change: War, religion, and
politics. Environmental
Communication,
11
(4), 452–469.
Banjeglav, T., & Moll, N. (2021). Outbreak
of war memories? Historical analogies of the 1990s wars in discourses about the coronavirus pandemic in Bosnia and Herzegovina
and Croatia. Southeast European and Black Sea
Studies,
21
(3), 353–372.
Berrocal, M., Kranert, M., Attolino, P., Santos, J. A. B., Santamaria, S. G., Henaku, N., … & Salamurović, A. (2021). Constructing
collective identities and solidarity in premiers’ early speeches on COVID-19: a global
perspective. Humanities and Social Sciences
Communications,
8
(1), 128–148.
Bogetić, K., Broćić, A., & Rasulić, K. (2019). Linguistic
metaphor identification in Serbian. In S. Nacey, A. G. Dorst, T. Krennmayr, W. Gudrun Reijnierse (Eds.). Metaphor
identification in multiple languages: MIPVU around the
world (pp. 203–226). John Benjamins.
Bogetić, K. (2022). Approaching
crisis discourse via metaphor: Some observations from the post-Yugoslav public discourses of the COVID-19
pandemic. Language. Text.
Society,
9
(2), 1–1.
Bouckaert, G., Galli, D., Kuhlmann, S., Reiter, R., & Van Hecke, S. (2020). European
Coronationalism? A Hot Spot Governing a Pandemic Crisis. Public Administration
Review,
80
(5), 765–773.
Brown, G., Langer, A., & Stewart, F. (2008). A
Typology of Post-Conflict Environments: An Overview. Crise Working
Papers,
53
1, 1–19.
Castro Seixas, E. (2021). War metaphors in political communication on COVID-19. Frontiers in Sociology, 51, 1–11.
Charteris-Black, J. (2004). Corpus
approaches to critical metaphor analysis. Palgrave.
(2021). Metaphors
of coronavirus: Invisible enemy or zombie
apocalypse? Palgrave.
Chapman, C. M., & Miller, D. S. (2020). From
metaphor to militarized response: the social implications of “we are at war with COVID-19”–crisis, disasters, and pandemics
yet to come. International Journal of Sociology and Social
Policy,
40
(9/10), 1107–1124.
Chatti, S. (2021). Military
framing of health threats: The COVID-19 disease as a case study. Language, Discourse &
Society,
9
(1), 33–44.
Dada, S., Ashworth, H., Bewa, M., & Dhatt, R. (2021). Words
matter: Political and gender analysis of speeches made by heads of government during the COVID-19
pandemic. BMJ
Health,
6
(1), e003910.
Demjén, Z., & Semino, E. (2016). Using
metaphor in healthcare: Physical health. In The Routledge handbook of
metaphor and
language (pp. 403–417). Routledge.
Despot, K. Š., & Anić, A. O. (2021). A
war on war metaphor: Metaphorical framings in Croatian discourse on COVID-19. Rasprave
Instituta za hrvatski jezik i
jezikoslovlje,
47
(1), 173–208.
Erll, A. (2020). Afterword:
Memory worlds in times of Corona. Memory
Studies,
13
(5), 861–874.
Fairclough, N. (2010). Critical
discourse analysis: The critical study of
language. Longman.
Flusberg, S. J., Matlock, T., & Thibodeau, P. H. (2017). Metaphors
for the war (or race) against climate change. Environmental
Communication,
11
(6), 769–783.
Grady, J. E. (1997). Foundations
of meaning: Primary metaphors and primary scenes. [Doctoral
dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.
Hauser, D. J., & Schwarz, N. (2015). The
war on prevention: Bellicose cancer metaphors hurt (some) prevention intentions. Personality
and Social Psychology
Bulletin,
41
(1), 66–77.
Jaspal, R., & Nerlich, B. (2020). Social
representations, identity threat, and coping amid COVID-19. Psychological Trauma: Theory,
Research, Practice, and
Policy,
12
(S1), S249.
Keightley, E., & Pickering, M. (2012). The
mnemonic imagination. Palgrave.
Koller, V. (2012). How
to analyse collective identity in discourse-textual and contextual parameters. Critical
Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across
Disciplines,
5
(2), 19–38.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors
we live by. University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, G. (1992). Metaphor
and war: The metaphor system used to justify war in the Gulf. Thirty Years of Linguistic
Evolution, 463–481.
Marey-Sarwan, I., Hamama-Raz, Y., Asadi, A., Nakad, B., & Hamama, L. (2022). “It’s
like we’re at war”: Nurses’ resilience and coping strategies during the COVID-19
pandemic. Nursing
Inquiry,
29
(3), e12472.
Musolff, A. (2022). “World-beating”
pandemic responses: Ironical, sarcastic, and satirical use of war and competition metaphors in the context of COVID-19
pandemic. Metaphor and
Symbol,
37
(2), 76–87.
Olza, I., Koller, V., Ibarretxe-Antuñano, I., Pérez-Sobrino, P., & Semino, E. (2021). The
#ReframeCovid initiative: From Twitter to society via metaphor. Metaphor and the Social
World,
11
(1), 98–120.
Rajandran, K. (2020). ‘A
Long Battle Ahead’: Malaysian and Singaporean prime ministers employ war metaphors for
COVID-19. GEMA Online Journal of Language
Studies,
20
(3), 261–267.
Ritchie, D. (2003). “Argument
is war”-or is it a game of chess? Multiple meanings in the analysis of implicit
metaphors. Metaphor and
Symbol,
18
(2), 125–146.
Semino, E. (2008). Metaphor
in discourse. Cambridge University Press.
(2021). “Not
soldiers but fire-fighters”–metaphors and COVID-19. Health
Communication,
36
(1), 50–58.
Salamurović, A. (2020). Metaphorical
and literal wars in Serbia. Cultures of History Forum, [URL], accessed Aug 2023.
Semino, E., Demjén, Z., & Demmen, J. (2018). An
integrated approach to metaphor and framing in cognition, discourse, and practice, with an application to metaphors for
cancer. Applied
Linguistics,
39
(5), 625–645.
Steen, G., Dorst, A. G., Herrmann, J. B., Kaal, A., Krennmayr, T., & Pasma, T. (2010). A
method for linguistic metaphor identification. John Benjamins.
Sontag, S. (1978). Illness
as metaphor. Giroux.
Thibodeau, P. H., & Boroditsky, L. (2011). Metaphors
we think with: The role of metaphor in reasoning. PloS
One,
6
(2), e16782.
Wicke, P., & Bolognesi, M. M. (2020). Framing
COVID-19: How we conceptualize and discuss the pandemic on Twitter. PloS
One,
15
(9), e0240010.