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In:COVID-19: Metaphor and metonymy across languages and cultures
Edited by Xu Wen, Wei-lun Lu, Joe Lennon and Zoltán Kövecses
[Metaphor in Language, Cognition, and Communication 11] 2025
► pp. 10–39

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Chapter 1
How do media talk about the COVID-19 pandemic?

Metaphorical thematic clustering in Italian online newspapers

 | Aston University
 | Università di Pisa
Published online: 6 October 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/milcc.11.01bus
Abstract
The contribution presents a study on figurative language from the first months of the COVID-19 crisis in Italian online newspapers. Particularly, we contrast topics and metaphorical language used by journalists in the first and second phases of the government response to the pandemic in Spring 2020. The analysis is conducted on a journalistic corpus collected between February 24th and June 3rd, 2020, and is performed using both quantitative and qualitative approaches: Structural Topic Modelling (Roberts et al., 2016); Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980); and qualitative-corpus based metaphor analysis (Charteris-Black, 2004). We find a significant shift in topics discussed across Phase 1 and Phase 2, and interesting overlaps in topic-specific metaphors. Using qualitative corpus analysis, we further discuss metaphorical collocations of the topics of Economy and Society.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Materials and methods
  • 3.Topic models
  • 4.Topic-specific metaphors
  • 5.Metaphors and complex systems: Economy and society
    • 5.1economy and society are buildings
    • 5.2economy and society are machines
    • 5.3economy and society are living organisms
  • 6.Content analysis
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
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