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Review of Cognitive Linguistics: Online-First ArticlesThe COVID-19 pandemic and changing meanings of flatten the curve
A cognitive semantic approach
This paper conducts a comparative analysis of the meanings of the phrase flatten the curve before and after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data from two corpora, the iWeb Corpus and the Coronavirus Corpus, it focuses on semantic frames (Fillmore, 1985) and frame metonymy (Dancygier & Sweetser, 2014). The investigation reveals that the construal of the phrase after the outbreak of COVID-19 requires the invocation of both bell curve and pandemic frames; that is, without the pandemic frame, the phrase would remain in the domain of statistics and refer to a change in a graph. The data are sorted into four semantic categories based on the context in which they appear (epidemiological/non-epidemiological) and on the effect they pursue regarding the flattening-the-curve scenario (rigorous/non-rigorous). The phrase’s polysemy is explained by the part of the process for effect of the process metonymy. The flatter curve, as a salient part of a scenario, serves to refer to one of the scenario’s effects. The analysis also observes a correlation between the real-world experience of the pandemic and the actual frequency of flatten the curve in that the ratio of each semantic category reflects the contemporaneous real-world significance of reducing the rate of increase of new infections.
Keywords: flatten the curve, COVID-19, semantic extension, polysemy, semantic frames, frame metonymy
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Preliminaries
- 2.1Phenomenon in focus: The flatten-the-curve strategy
- 2.1.1The purpose of the strategy
- 2.1.2US COVID-19 phases
- 2.2Theoretical background: Cognitive linguistic approaches
- 2.2.1Frame semantics
- 2.2.2Conceptual metonymy
- 2.1Phenomenon in focus: The flatten-the-curve strategy
- 3.Data collection
- 3.1Why the iWeb Corpus and the Coronavirus Corpus?
- 3.2The iWeb Corpus data
- 3.3The Coronavirus Corpus data
- 4.Data analysis
- 4.1 Flatten the Curve: Before the pandemic
- 4.2
Flatten the Curve: During the pandemic
- 4.2.1The Epidemiological-Rigorous category
- 4.2.2The Epidemiological-Non-Rigorous category
- 4.2.3The Non-Epidemiological-Rigorous category
- 4.2.4The Non-Epidemiological-Non-Rigorous category
- 5.Discussion
- 5.1The semantic network of Flatten the Curve
- 5.2Correlation with US COVID-19 phases
- 6.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
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