A Comparative Analysis of War Metaphors in COVID-19 Reports in New York Times and China Daily

Yanmei  Xiao

doi:10.26689/jcer.v5i5.2155

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Keywords

COVID-19
War metaphor
Critical metaphor analysis

DOI

10.26689/jcer.v5i5.2155

Submitted : 2021-05-03

Accepted : 2021-05-18

Published : 2021-06-02

Abstract

This paper analyzed the use of war metaphors in COVID-19 news reported by the New York Times (NYT) in comparison to the China Daily from the 1^st of February 2020 to the 29^th of February 2020. Based on self-selected corpus from these two newspapers, a study was conducted to compare the contrasting lexis between NYT and China Daily, as well as to analyze the reasons for their differences using the Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA). It was found that China Daily preferred using war metaphors in COVID-19 reports and war-related words such as “fight,” “combat,” and “battle.” These words appeared frequently which demonstrated that Chinese people were fighting against the pandemic. However, these words were far less used in the NYT reports compared to China Daily and the use of these words were more related to the election, trade war, etc. This reflected their focus which was more on the impact of COVID-19 on politics and the economic sector.

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