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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. 63–82

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Chapter 3
Social variation in metaphors

Preferred metaphors by occupation in the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan

 | Kobe University
Published online: 6 October 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/milcc.11.03kom
Abstract
That metaphor varies depending on the social context is crucial to understanding social variation in metaphors during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our analysis of metaphorical utterances in direct quotations from Japanese newspaper articles reveals that the metaphor disease is war was preferred in government, politics, and healthcare, whereas business is war was common in hospitality, tourism, transport, and financial services. These two war metaphors had different foci from those in conventional usage and included emergent properties closely linked to the social contexts of a pandemic. Our study illustrates that the analysis of social factors, including occupation, is a useful approach to explore variations in the foci of a metaphor as well as variations in the types of metaphors.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Methodology
    • Data
    • Identification of metaphors
    • Description of metaphors
  • Results
    • Conceptual variation in metaphors
    • Social variation in metaphors
  • Discussion
  • War metaphors in political and medical contexts
  • War metaphors in economic and commercial contexts
  • Conclusion
  • Abbreviations
  • References
References (36)
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