COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic set off a maelstrom of social, cultural, and political changes—as well as some surprising linguistic ones. This volume explores these dramatic changes through the lens of Cognitive Linguistics, analysing noteworthy examples of pandemic discourse to reveal correspondences and contrasts between different cultures’ conceptions of the illness and its aftermath. The contributions examine a variety of genres, including newspaper articles, storefront signs, artistic creations, personal interviews, social media comments, and political speeches. They look at communication in various domains—business, media, politics, economics, art, and psychiatry. And they compare past and present, showing how the modern pandemic both continued and interrupted previous patterns of discourse around illness and disease. These diverse analyses show how Cognitive Linguistics, on the cutting edge of quantitative, sociocultural, and interdisciplinary turns in linguistics, can be a powerful theoretical tool in uncovering parallels and variations in how different cultures communicate in times of crisis.