A Corpus Analysis of ‘Disaster’ Metaphorical Expressions taken from Dawn Newspaper

Abstract

As metaphor is a good tool for conceptualizing the COVID-19 pandemic. So, metaphors are extracted from COVID-19-related news stories which offer a unique lens for examining how the individual writers perceive the pandemic. The current paper aimed to describe conceptual metaphors related to COVID-19 IS DISASTER in the discourse of Pakistani newspaper’s news stories. For this purpose, the data was analyzed using the theoretical framework of “Conceptual Metaphor Theory” (CMT), which is proposed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in the field of Cognitive Linguistics. The antconc software was used for Dawn newspaper’s data analysis. The data was collected from January 2020 till December 2020 by using the Pragglejazz group of Identification Method for Metaphors (2007). The analysis of the corpus of "Dawn " Newspaper reveals that the conceptual metaphors COVID-19 IS DISASTER and COVID-19 IS NATURAL DISASTER were found with the frequency of 53 and 102 metaphors respectively in the data. The findings proved the effectiveness of metaphor in print media communication, its significance to understand difficult situations, efficiently communicate ideas and influence the audience. Any future research in this area would benefit from including more metaphor areas and search words by using a larger corpus.