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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. 190–215

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Chapter 8
Communicating socio-psychological meanings

Metaphors in Hong Kong press conferences on measures against COVID-19

 | The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
 | Nanyang Technological University
Published online: 6 October 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/milcc.11.08xie
Abstract
During the COVID-19 pandemic, government press conferences in Hong Kong explained the crisis, and detailed precautions, measures, and policy rationale, bringing together conceptualizations of the pandemic and emotional reassurances toward public concerns. Analyzing the uses of metaphors in such press conferences contributes to an understanding of the conceptualization of issues related to COVID-19 in the Asia context and the important role of metaphors in communicating socio-psychological meanings. This chapter adopts a quantitative approach to analyzing metaphors in transcripts (N = 17) of Hong Kong press conferences on measures against COVID-19 by the Chief Executive (CE) from 26 January 2020 to 15 September 2020. Following Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP) (Pragglejaz Group, 2007) with inter-rater reliability examinations (k = .72), we identified 3,228 metaphorical units from the corpus, further grouped into 16 source domains under five key topics. Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) (Pennebaker, Boyd, Jordan, & Blackburn, 2015) was used to score each transcript under relevant categories, i.e., Linguistic Dimensions and Psychological Processes. Statistical analysis showed significant associations between sources, key topics, and socio-psychological categories, which highlight the important role of metaphors in framing issues related to COVID-19 and conveying socio-psychological meanings.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1Corpus building
    • 2.2Metaphor identification
    • 2.3LIWC coding and statistical analyses
  • 3.Results and discussion
    • 3.1Source domains and key topics
    • 3.2The relationship between metaphors and the socio-psychological meaning of the text
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (36)
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