Linguistics
Mahsa Sadeghi
Abstract
Metaphors have a very essential role and importance in the system of the human mind and cognition. From the very beginning of the outbreak of the Coronavirus disease (Covid-19) to the present day, metaphors have played a significant role in the conceptualization of this illness and related issues. The ...
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Metaphors have a very essential role and importance in the system of the human mind and cognition. From the very beginning of the outbreak of the Coronavirus disease (Covid-19) to the present day, metaphors have played a significant role in the conceptualization of this illness and related issues. The aim of the present research is to investigate the metaphorical conceptualizations of Corona in the news headlines of domestic Persian-language media. The research data include 220 metaphorical expressions in the headlines extracted from the websites of four news agencies including Fars, ISNA, Tasnim, and Mehr. The Data were analyzed within the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff, 1987, 1993; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999) and the theory of image schemas (Johnson, 1987; Lakoff, 1987). The results show that the metaphors used to conceptualize the Corona can be divided into two main categories: Metaphors based on image schemas and metaphors separate from image schemas. In the formation of first metaphors, force schema plays a major role and can manifest as the schemas of war, natural forces, and football. In the formation of the second category of metaphors, the source domains of humans and animals as well as domains such as fire, shadow, and vehicle play a major role.
Masood Ghayoomi
Abstract
Coronavirus pandemic caused changes in the daily lifestyle, such as reducing social interactions and creating social distancing. In this research, we pursue two goals. One is algorithmic content analysis of comments/posts in Persian related to the Coronavirus on two social media, namely Tweeter and Instagram. ...
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Coronavirus pandemic caused changes in the daily lifestyle, such as reducing social interactions and creating social distancing. In this research, we pursue two goals. One is algorithmic content analysis of comments/posts in Persian related to the Coronavirus on two social media, namely Tweeter and Instagram. To this end, topic modeling is used as a method for content analysis to cluster the data into abstract topics. The other goal is finding the correlation between topics and hashtags in the comments/posts. To this end, we developed a corpus from these two social media. We found 24 abstract topics by algorithmic content analysis of this corpus and they were manually labeled to be comprehensive. According to the corpus and the statistical information of the extracted topics, it can be speculated that about 25% of the comments/posts in this corpus focused on political and social issues of the virus. 10 fine-grained topics which contained 35% of the comments were related to the Coronavirus itself and its pandemic property. This indicates the importance of the attention that has been paid to social media for informing and disseminating information. Furthermore, the hypothesis of existing correlation between topics and hashtags was studied from statistical point of view by using the Pearson correlation coefficient. For 20 topics, a high correlation score between topics and hashtags was found; but this correlation was not found for 4 topics. The outcome of this research can be used to increase the internal coherence of a text and to make the hashtags predictable.
Hussein Mollanazar; Arghavan Omranipour
Abstract
The novel coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak has led to the eye-catching emergence of new words and metaphors in the world. The important properties of languages are productivity and creativity as language users need new words to describe new concepts and situations. Sometimes, due to cultural and ...
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The novel coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak has led to the eye-catching emergence of new words and metaphors in the world. The important properties of languages are productivity and creativity as language users need new words to describe new concepts and situations. Sometimes, due to cultural and social changes, languages should be compatible with new circumstances in order to guide behaviors and construct cultures. The Persian language can also be changed through the emergence of new words and equivalents in such linguistic and extra-linguistic evolution. The emergence of new words and metaphors may shape various behaviors, thus influencing cultural, social, and political aspects. Language, the powerful cultural and social means, should be taken into consideration as its appropriate use may contribute to further the aims of communities. The present research explored various aspects of the selected words related to the COVID-19 outbreak. The results revealed that such words are mostly compound-derivative ones and the result of borrowing, loan blending, and calque.
