The COVID-19 pandemic and changing meanings of flatten the curve

Abstract 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.