Metaphors in crisis communication. A combined qualitative-quantitative approach of the Covid-19 crisis

Pizarro Pedraza, Andrea [USL-B] Cougnon, Louise-Amélie [UCL]

and Reddit corpora. More specifically, the authors qualitatively and quantitatively process a corpus of official textual discourses, advices, and reactions in a hundred thousand electronic messages of the population, politics, experts, and the media in Europe. Metaphors constitute a substantial contribution to the understanding of how the population may overcome or survive a crisis, as they influence perception of reality and, thus, persuasion [2,3] and behaviour [4]. The selection of a metaphor by officials activates a particular frame [5], and the reception of metaphors by the population is an inherently evaluative process [6] that involves subjective interpretation of the described phenomenon. The context of Covid-19 displays various properties (rhythm, causes, implications, changes in society…) that engage specific discourse patterns [7], leads to infodemic [8], and to polarisation in the population’s reactions [9,10]. The authors of this paper will look into the crisis’ discourses, combining corpus linguistics methods to identify and describe metaphors, and a discourse analysis approach to study the variation of reactions and responses to these metaphors. The following research questions will lead the research conduct: • What metaphors are Covid-19-typical? Which ones are common to other crises (for instance, war metaphors)? What are their emotional load/connotations? • Which content producer makes use of most metaphors and for what purpose (advice, enforcement, reinsurance…)? • How do people react to different metaphors related to health? • How do metaphors participate in infodemic in a rapid crisis management? • What can this study of metaphors tell us about the European society’s adaptation to crisis?