Affiliation:
1. Guilin University of Technology
2. Guangdong University of Foreign Studies
Abstract
Abstract
The present longitudinal study investigates how the entailments of war metaphors evolve in different
stages of COVID-19 containment in China using data from three documentaries made by Xinhua News Agency. A social semiotic model of
multimodal metaphor analysis is adopted to analyze the military metaphors systematically in terms of semantic choice, multimodal
realization, and context. The war framing is found as the pivotal rhetoric to conceptualize China’s response toward
COVID-19 but distinctive features are attributed over time with a focus shifting from the “inevitability” in the initial stage to
societal reactions in the later stage. In addition, socio-cultural factors embodied in multimodality not only efficiently guide
the public to reason about the situation but also socialize the population to self-disciplining for the sake of everyone’s
interest.
Publisher
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Subject
Linguistics and Language,Developmental and Educational Psychology,Language and Linguistics