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Article published In: Bringing Figurative Language into Real L2 Classrooms: The challenges of empirical testing
Edited by Ana M. Piquer-Píriz and Reyes Llopis-García
[Review of Cognitive Linguistics 22:2] 2024
► pp. 505–540

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Regular article

The COVID-19 pandemic and changing meanings of flatten the curve

A cognitive semantic approach

 | Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
ORCiD logo with link | Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
Published online: 22 September 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00158.kan
Abstract
This paper conducts a comparative analysis of the meanings of the phrase flatten the curve before and after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data from two corpora, the iWeb Corpus and the Coronavirus Corpus, it focuses on semantic frames (Fillmore, C. J. (1985). Frames and the semantics of understanding. Quaderni di Semantica, 6(2), 222–254.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) and frame metonymy ( (Eds.). (2014). Figurative language. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). The investigation reveals that the construal of the phrase after the outbreak of COVID-19 requires the invocation of both bell curve and pandemic frames; that is, without the pandemic frame, the phrase would remain in the domain of statistics and refer to a change in a graph. The data are sorted into four semantic categories based on the context in which they appear (epidemiological/non-epidemiological) and on the effect they pursue regarding the flattening-the-curve scenario (rigorous/non-rigorous). The phrase’s polysemy is explained by the part of the process for effect of the process metonymy. The flatter curve, as a salient part of a scenario, serves to refer to one of the scenario’s effects. The analysis also observes a correlation between the real-world experience of the pandemic and the actual frequency of flatten the curve in that the ratio of each semantic category reflects the contemporaneous real-world significance of reducing the rate of increase of new infections.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Preliminaries
    • 2.1Phenomenon in focus: The flatten-the-curve strategy
      • 2.1.1The purpose of the strategy
      • 2.1.2US COVID-19 phases
    • 2.2Theoretical background: Cognitive linguistic approaches
      • 2.2.1Frame semantics
      • 2.2.2Conceptual metonymy
  • 3.Data collection
    • 3.1Why the iWeb Corpus and the Coronavirus Corpus?
    • 3.2The iWeb Corpus data
    • 3.3The Coronavirus Corpus data
  • 4.Data analysis
    • 4.1Flatten the Curve: Before the pandemic
    • 4.2Flatten the Curve: During the pandemic
      • 4.2.1The Epidemiological-Rigorous category
      • 4.2.2The Epidemiological-Non-Rigorous category
      • 4.2.3The Non-Epidemiological-Rigorous category
      • 4.2.4The Non-Epidemiological-Non-Rigorous category
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1The semantic network of Flatten the Curve
    • 5.2Correlation with US COVID-19 phases
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (27)
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