Abstract

This study investigates the notion of ‘framing’ as a function of metaphor from the interrelated cognitive and discourse-based perspectives. The study adopts a corpus-based approach to analyse ‘war’ and ‘journey’ metaphors used for COVID-19 in online newspapers and magazine articles about the pandemic, such as the victory against the virus was won or the community saw light at the end of the tunnel. The aim of the study is to show that the notion of framing can be applied at different levels of generality in metaphor analysis – from conceptual metaphors to linguistic metaphors – which should be taken into account when communicating about sensitive topics such as COVID-19. As a secondary goal, the study aims at showing the importance of a definition of framing which includes more specific scenarios and aspects such as agency and emotion.