37.1504, Reviews: COVID-19: Xu Wen, Wei-lun Lu, Joe Lennon, Zoltán Kövecses (eds.) (2025)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-1504. Mon Apr 20 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.1504, Reviews: COVID-19: Xu Wen, Wei-lun Lu, Joe Lennon, Zoltán Kövecses (eds.) (2025)

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Date: 20-Apr-2026
From: SARAH MARIE DANIEL [S.M.Daniel at leeds.ac.uk]
Subject: Xu Wen, Wei-lun Lu, Joe Lennon, Zoltán Kövecses (eds.) (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-3388

Title: COVID-19
Subtitle: Metaphor and Metonymy Across Languages and Cultures
Series Title: Metaphor in Language, Cognition, and Communication   11
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: John Benjamins
           http://www.benjamins.com/
Book URL: https://benjamins.com/catalog/milcc.11

Editor(s): Xu Wen, Wei-lun Lu, Joe Lennon, Zoltán Kövecses

Reviewer: SARAH MARIE DANIEL

SUMMARY
Covid-19: Metaphor and metonymy across languages and cultures is an
edited volume in the John Benjamins Publishing Company series Metaphor
in Language, Cognition and Communication. It was edited by Xu Wen,
Wei-lun Lu, Joe Lennon and Zoltán Kövecses and contains 13 chapters.
These 13 chapters discuss Covid discourse across all continents except
Antarctica, although European discourse is the most frequently
discussed.
The book is split into five sections: Metaphor in mainstream
newspapers, Metaphor in interlocution, War metaphor and alternatives,
Metaphor in governance discourse, and Metaphor and metonymy in the
multimodal dimension.
Chapter 1, by Lucia Busso and Ottavia Tordini, discusses metaphorical
themes used in online Italian newspapers in the first 4-5 months of
the Covid-19 crisis. They use a corpus-based approach combined with
Structural Topic Modelling (Roberts et al., 2016) to examine which
topics were discussed metaphorically and which metaphors tended to be
used to present specific topics. The corpus covered two phases of the
Italian government’s response to the pandemic, allowing the authors to
explore differences in discourse between these two phases.
Chapter 2, by Mustapha Bala Tsakuwa and Xu Wen, examines metaphors for
the Covid pandemic in a Hausa-language newspaper published in Nigeria.
Their corpus included articles published from January-June 2020 which
focused on the pandemic. They focus on four topics: describing the
virus, discussing transmission, presenting the effects of the virus,
and the actions taken against the virus.  They also analyse the 16
metaphorical mappings that were used to present these topics. The
authors highlight the links between these mappings and Nigerian
culture and history.
Chapter 3, by Tetsuta Komatsubara, uses the press as a vehicle to
examine the metaphors preferred by people in Japan, depending on their
occupation. The author examines direct quotations in Japanese
newspapers which contained the most common Japanese word for
coronavirus. Information about the person quoted, including their job
title, was always included, allowing an analysis of which mappings
were preferred by different occupations. The author further considers
differences of framing between occupations which use the same
metaphor.
Metaphor in interlocution
Chapter 4, by Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk and Piotr Pęzik, looks at
figurative conceptualisations of the pandemic and its consequences in
informal discourse in Poland from March to December 2020. They compare
opportunistically gathered data from conversations, radio and social
media with a monitor corpus of Polish press from the same time. Their
analysis looks at metaphorical mappings and evaluative valence, and
the authors highlight differences between metaphorical
conceptualisations in the press and the public. They also note some
source domains that were more culturally-specific to Poland and
provide a cultural explanation of the finding that some source domains
that were commonly found elsewhere were less common in this data.
Chapter 5, by Federica Ferrari, focuses on the mental health effects
of the pandemic and associated lockdowns. The author is also
interested in the role of (self-)persuasion in identity construction
and combines metaphor and persuasion analysis. Her data consisted of
interviews with health professionals and mental health professionals
(experts) and non-experts, largely University students and staff in
non-health related fields. The interview questions for all
participants probed their emotional response to the pandemic and
lockdowns and contained one question that prompted for metaphor. The
interviews with experts also asked about the effect of Covid-19 on
them as professionals. The author highlights the fact that
professionals tended initially to respond to personal questions with
more general concerns and that metaphor became a vehicle for them to
think about their emotional responses.
WAR metaphor and alternatives
Chapter 6, by Karen Sullivan, looks at the use of FIRE metaphors for
Covid-19 by the Australian press as compared with the press in other
English-speaking countries. In Australia the Covid-19 pandemic
immediately followed one of the worst bushfire seasons on record,
which the author contends influenced the Australian use of FIRE
metaphors to describe the pandemic. She presents a quantitative corpus
analysis of metaphorical use of fire words in the Australian and
international press. This is combined with a qualitative analysis of
examples from both samples which illustrate the seven aspects of fire
metaphors proposed by Semino (2020). The author proposes an eighth
characteristic based on the Australian data and describes how
Australian sources used FIRE metaphors differently to other
English-speaking countries.
Chapter 7, by Andreas Musolff, explores how the press in Britain and
Germany used WAR metaphors and how this shows differing figurative
conceptualisations of the pandemic between the two countries. He
analyses a bilingual corpus of mainstream press sources published
between January and October in both countries. A brief quantitative
analysis shows a similar incidence of war metaphors in the two
countries. This is followed by an in-depth qualitative analysis
showing different WAR scenarios present in the two countries, with
five different functions of these metaphors being identified. The
author stresses that a focus on frequency does not give the full
picture, as usage can be very different.
Metaphor in governance discourse
Chapter 8, by Molly Xie Pan and Dennis Tay, looks at metaphors in Hong
Kong press conferences communicating Covid mitigation measures. The
authors carry out a corpus-driven study and use statistical analysis
to investigate the topics, linguistic features and socio-psychological
categories that correlated with different source domains. They go on
to analyse statistically significant correlations in more detail and
give examples of these from the corpus.
Chapter 9, by Svitlana Shurma and Alla Golovnia contrasts the use of
metaphor in state discourse in Ukraine and Belarus. The authors
explore a corpus of articles in a pandemic-specific section of
state-owned news media websites in each country. The two countries
approached the pandemic differently with Belarus not imposing
lockdowns, while Ukraine did. The authors identify four different
source domains used by each country and one shared source domain
(PERSON). They analyse examples of each countries’ use of these source
domains, looking at the scenario presented and the intended effect of
the discourse.
Metaphor and metonymy in the multimodal dimension
Chapter 10 by Barbara Dancygier, Danielle Lee, Adrian Lou and Kevin
Wong, analyses storefront communication as shops in Vancouver reopened
to in-person customers. The authors analyse 214 examples and compare
them with standard storefront signage from before the pandemic. They
discuss the challenge for business of balancing their need to
communicate and enforce social distancing measures with the need to
encourage customers to return through portraying a safe and welcoming
environment. The authors focus on four aspects that businesses used in
their signage to balance these conflicting needs.
Chapter 11, by Ulrike Schröder, Anna Ladilova and Thiago da Cunha
Nascimento analyse co-speech gestures in press conferences, briefings
and interviews with Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro. The authors
selected these two as populist presidents whose countries had some of
the worst Covid outcomes. They use Bressam’s (2013) categories for
describing gesture form, and analyse the gestures and their
co-occurring speech for metaphoricity. They show that Trump and
Bolsonaro use different textual and gestural metaphors for Covid but
that both use the discourse to reaffirm their position as leader.
Chapter 12, by Xu Wen and Shanfan Chen, looks at cartoons in the
Chinese press and the visual metaphors they use to frame Covid-19. The
authors analysed a corpus of 502 cartoons relating to Covid from the
China Daily website and found that the most common referents were war
and Chinese legend. This chapter presents an in-depth analysis of 21
of the cartoons featuring war or Chinese legend. The authors employ
Conceptual Blending Theory (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002) to analyse
the blends created in these cartoons. They highlight the use of WAR
scenarios and cultural figures to encourage the population to act
against the virus.
Chapter 13, by Šárka Havlíčková Kysová and Wei-lun Lu, examine the
Coronasong, a short video produced by the National Theatre of Brno in
Czechia. The authors analyse the text, music, and vocal and physical
acting for metaphor, particularly those related to the lockdown and
its effect on the arts. They combine Conceptual Metaphor Theory,
Construction Grammar and musical grammar in their analysis of
different aspects of the text. The authors highlight how the music
supports the textual message of the work.
EVALUATION
This volume focuses on discourse appearing during the Covid-19
pandemic and the use of metaphor and metonymy in presenting the
disease itself, the measures taken against it, and people’s reactions
to the crisis and the ensuing lockdowns. The volume is of interest to
scholars in metaphor and figurative language, discourse analysis, and
healthcare communication. Individual chapters will also appeal to
those with interests in business communication, gesture analysis,
visual metaphor analysis, and poetic devices in music.
The volume’s strength is in bringing together a range of
methodological approaches, modes of communication and languages. This
both illustrates the diversity of figurative conceptualisations of the
pandemic, and shows that there was also some consistency across
different languages and cultures. Chapters seven and eight were
particularly interesting for me as a corpus linguist. These each
highlight the need to go beyond reporting the frequency with which
particular source domains are used in order to fully understand the
role of metaphor in a particular corpus.
An edited volume like this highlights the subjectivity involved in
identifying and categorising source domains, as between chapters it is
possible to see similar framings described differently depending on
the authors’ analytical lens. This is not a criticism of the volume
itself, but it does show an issue with replicability and comparability
in the field.
A limitation of the book is the focus on the early stages of the
pandemic. None of the chapters examine data occurring later than
December 2020 and only three consider data from the third quarter of
2020. Chapters Four and Seven, which analysed data from the longest
periods, identified a shift in the metaphors used and/or the framing
of the pandemic as it progressed. This suggests that additional
insights could have been gathered from a wider chronological sample.
However, the publication process does impose time limitations and this
was perhaps not possible for this volume.
The final section on multimodality is difficult for me to evaluate as
my expertise is in analysing metaphors in text. From my perspective
this adds to the volume by giving a perspective on how the same
metaphorical mappings are conveyed without, or alongside, text.
REFERENCES
Bressam, J. (2013). A linguistic perspective on the notation of form
features in gesture. In C. Müller, A. Cienki, E. Fricke, S. Ladewig,
D.McNeill & S. Tessendorf (Eds.), Body – language – communication: An
international handbook on multimodality in human interaction, Vol 1
(pp. 1079-1098). De Gruyter Mouton.
Fauconnier, G. & Turner, M. (2002). The way we think : Conceptual
blending and the mind’s hidden complexities. Basic Books.
Roberts, M.E., Stewart, Brandon M., & Tingley, D (2016). Navigating
the local modes of big data: The case of topic models. In R. M.
Alvarez (Ed.), Computational social science: Discovery and prediction
(Analytical methods for social research) (pp. 51-97). Cambridge
University Press.
Semino E. (2020, July 1) ‘A fire raging’: Why fire metaphors work well
for Covid-19. ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science
(CASS).
https://cass.lancs.ac.uk/a-fire-raging-why-fire-metaphors-work-well-for-covid-19/
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Sarah Daniel is a Research Fellow in the School of Education at the
University of Leeds. She holds a PhD in Translation Studies from
Swansea University and Université Grenoble Alpes. Her research
interests are in translation of metaphor, use of metaphor to convey
ideology, children and young people’s use of language, and translation
process research.



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