Metaphors and metonymies on COVID-19 pandemic and quarantine

Abstract

In the last decades, studies on metaphor and metonymy have increased. These phenomena have been understood not as style resources, but as conceptual mechanisms. Lakoff and Johnson’s book (1980) triggered this novel conception of metaphor and all
the subsequent theoretical developments. One of the paths that these inquiries have travelled is the analysis of various metaphors in corpora belonging to different discourse genres. In this paper, some metaphors and metonymies on the COVID-19 pandemic
and the quarantine situation are studied; they were taken from texts published in the social networks. This paper analyses different metaphors and metonyms that project the domains of soccer, religion, war, navigation and computing, among others. Also, different types of personification are explored.