Abstract
Pandemics, wars, and climate change are all threats and crises. This paper focuses on the pandemic crisis terms and metaphors in the newspaper corpus Taiwan News Smart Web. We apply the analytic framework Metaphor Identification in Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black 2018) and Propaganda techniques (Da San Martino et al. 2019) and ask the following research questions: (1). How are the crisis terms and metaphors used in the Mandarin Chinese news reports in Taiwan? (2). Are there any metaphorical patterns generated? The results of the study indicate that Mandarin crisis terms can be categorized into medical, politic, economic, academic, and network fields. They are used from daily life, community to school. The source domains of the metaphors that mapped onto the target domain {crisis} are {geography}, {transportation}, and {emotion}. Such emotional expressions are for instance si-cheng 死城 ‘dead city’ and baofuxing-luyou 報復性旅遊 ‘retaliated tourism’. The linguistic patterns varied and phonological application is popular. For example, homophones jialing 加零 ‘add zero (infection)’ to jialing 嘉玲 ‘personal name’ and jialing佳玲 ‘personal name’, the language is used to expand the semantic meaning without abandoning the original meaning. Bringing in new semantic purpose vividly and interestingly. In addition to the metaphor of anthropomorphism and linguistic characteristics in Mandarin, the crisis metaphors also cross into different semantic domains at the same time. The epidemic rise and fall, business occasions, and personal names are all used based on the clever employment of language.
Presenters
Shelley Ching-yu DepnerDepartment of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
CRISIS TERMS, NEOLOGISM, METAPHORS, PANDEMIC, LIFE-FORM STUDY, METAPHORICAL PATTERNS
