Kremer Dominik, Felgenhauer Tilo
Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany.
Pädagogische Hochschule Oberösterreich, Linz, Germany.
Humanit Soc Sci Commun. 2022;9(1):265. doi: 10.1057/s41599-022-01264-8. Epub 2022 Aug 8.
As other crises before, the COVID-19 pandemic put established discursive routines at stake. By framing the pandemic as a crisis, an immediate search for adequate counter-measures started to define proper means of mitigation and protection for the population. In the early stages of COVID-19, when little reliable information on the virus and its transmission behaviour was available, an intense use of metaphor to explain and govern the crisis had to be expected. Beside its well-known impact on (geo-)politics, a thorough analysis especially of the use of spatial metaphors to reason about the crises is still missing. In our approach, we rely on the foundational work of Lakoff and Johnson (1980) on image schemata, and prior work on spatial metaphors as part of argumentation patterns from cultural geography (Schlottmann, 2008). After a thorough analysis of prominent examples according to the argumentation scheme of Toulmin (1976 [1958]), we explored examples from the pre-existing corpus on COVID-19, deliberately compiled by DWDS for analysis of language patterns used throughout the pandemic. In a subsequent filter-refinement approach building on methods from cognitive linguistics and utilising a chunk of the same corpus, we were able to obtain and discuss results on the variety of spatial metaphors used at that time.
与之前的其他危机一样，新冠疫情使既定的话语惯例受到威胁。通过将疫情界定为一场危机，人们立刻开始寻找适当的应对措施，以确定减轻疫情影响和保护民众的恰当方法。在新冠疫情初期，由于关于病毒及其传播行为的可靠信息很少，人们不得不预期会大量使用隐喻来解释和应对这场危机。除了其对（地缘）政治的众所周知的影响外，目前仍缺乏对尤其是使用空间隐喻来推断危机的深入分析。在我们的研究方法中，我们依赖于莱考夫和约翰逊（1980）关于意象图式的基础研究，以及之前将空间隐喻作为文化地理学论证模式一部分的研究（施洛特曼，2008）。根据图尔敏（1976 [1958]）的论证模式对突出例子进行深入分析后，我们从德国语言数据服务中心（DWDS）特意编纂的、用于分析疫情期间使用的语言模式的新冠疫情既有语料库中探究例子。在随后基于认知语言学方法并利用同一语料库的一部分进行的筛选优化方法中，我们得以获取并讨论当时所使用的各种空间隐喻的结果。
