‘QUO VADIS, CORONA?’: METAPHORICAL FRAMING OF THE PANDEMIC IN DAILY PRESS

Abstract

The paper deals with the ways Croatian and Serbian daily newspapers wrote about the Covid-19 pandemic at its outbreak in 2020. The aim of the paper was to identify and describe metaphors in the selected corpus of texts in order to determine the metaphorical framing used in newspapers. This corpus-based research of media discourse was based on a qualitative bottom-up analysis that started from lexical metaphors found in the texts. The results of this study suggest that a whole range of metaphorical mappings is used to frame the pandemic in the media in Croatian and Serbian. The results indicate that in both languages the same conventional metaphors were used. The pandemic was metaphorically conceptualized as an opponent, as some kind of disaster such as fire, or war. Different elements of the metaphorical mapping were made salient and foregrounded, depending on the text type. The obtained results are largely in line with previous research on using metaphors to describe the process of dealing with diseases.