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Article published In:
Review of Cognitive Linguistics
Vol. 21:2 (2023) ► pp.444–468

From a war of defense to conventional wars

Military metaphors for COVID-19 containment in Chinese documentaries

| Guilin University of Technology
| Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

The present longitudinal study investigates how the entailments of war metaphors evolve in different stages of COVID-19 containment in China using data from three documentaries made by Xinhua News Agency. A social semiotic model of multimodal metaphor analysis is adopted to analyze the military metaphors systematically in terms of semantic choice, multimodal realization, and context. The war framing is found as the pivotal rhetoric to conceptualize China’s response toward COVID-19 but distinctive features are attributed over time with a focus shifting from the “inevitability” in the initial stage to societal reactions in the later stage. In addition, socio-cultural factors embodied in multimodality not only efficiently guide the public to reason about the situation but also socialize the population to self-disciplining for the sake of everyone’s interest.

Keywords: WAR metaphors, COVID-19 containment, China, multi-modal metaphor analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1China’s fight against COVID-19
    • 2.2COVID-19 and military metaphors
  • 3.Theoretical basis
  • 4.Method
    • 4.1Materials for the study
    • 4.2Data collection
  • 5.Analysis
    • 5.1Analysis of discourse semantics
      • 5.1.1Participants
      • 5.1.2Parts
      • 5.1.3Stages
    • 5.2Analysis of semiotic elements
      • 5.2.1Semiotic resources
      • 5.2.2Conceptual interaction
    • 5.3Analysis of context
      • 5.3.1Social situation
      • 5.3.2Collective historical memory
      • 5.3.3Culture of family-nation sentiment
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 2 March 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00141.tan
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