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Article published In:
Living Metaphors and Metonymies
Edited by Mario Brdar and Rita Brdar-Szabó
[Review of Cognitive Linguistics 20:1] 2022
► pp. 231–257

Metonymy and the polysemy of Covid in Italian

ORCID logo | University of Naples L’Orientale
ORCID logo | University of Naples L’Orientale
Among the linguistic consequences of the current pandemic, we focus on the usage of the lexeme Covid(-19) in Italian, both in the language of the daily press and in institutional/technical language. More specifically, we analyze the range of its polysemy and the role of metonymy in the semantic shifts that have produced it. The salience of the highly infectious pathogen, which also prompted its metaphorical reconceptualization, triggered the first extension of the term, originally denoting the disease, to predominantly denote the virus that causes it. This has also resulted in an almost complete shift of grammatical gender from feminine to masculine. Beside the primary metonymic shift, Covid(-19) developed a variety of further meanings which highlight different components of the emerging covid frame. The linguistic data are drawn from La Repubblica, a daily general-interest newspaper, and from a selection of texts by major governmental and health institutions.
Keywords: metonymy, pandemic, polysemy, grammatical gender, frame, metaphor, Italian
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The names of infectious diseases and related pathogens
  • 3. Covid. The salience of the virus and the metonymic shift
    • 3.1 covid as an animate entity
    • 3.2Gender assignment: from feminine to masculine
  • 4. covid as a frame
    • 4.1 covid as an event and a period in time
    • 4.2 covid as socio-economic impact of the pandemic
    • 4.3Metonymies in the domain of health and health care
      • 4.3.1 covid as type of covid disease, case of covid disease, infected/diseased person
      • 4.3.2 covid as contagion (rate) and containment of
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 24 May 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00109.pan
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