Fight the virus, stick with the rules and reduce the peak: an analysis of the metaphors used by Boris Johnson and Nicola Sturgeon to discuss the COVID-19 pandemic

The field of metaphor research, which is a sub-discipline of cognitive linguistics spanning from the 1980s, has shown that metaphor can shape thought (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) and affect reasoning (Thibodeau and Boroditsky 2011), emotions (Hendricks et al. 2018) and behaviour (Hauser and Schwarz 2015). One reason behind this power of metaphor is its ability to ‘frame’ concepts. This refers to the way metaphors can highlight some aspects of a concept and background others, therefore offering a certain interpretation made by the speaker to the listener (Entman 1993: 52; Boeynaems et al. 2017: 199). Recently, metaphor researchers have been applying this power of metaphor to investigate how the metaphors used by prominent political leaders frame the COVID-19 pandemic. One group of researchers have started the #ReframeCOVID project which aims to find other metaphors for the pandemic that are not just focused on war and violence, such as describing it as a ‘fire’ which needs to be ‘put out’ (Semino 2020). 

 

Despite this focus on metaphors for COVID-19, there has of yet been few in-depth studies on the metaphors used by UK politicians, specifically from Scottish politicians like Nicola Sturgeon and those from England, like Boris Johnson. Such a study would illuminate how the pandemic is framed in the UK. My aim is to investigate the discourse of Boris Johnson and Nicola Sturgeon and ask what metaphors they used to discuss the pandemic and if these metaphors differed in any way. 

 

I extracted the metaphors from a sample corpus of their daily press conferences between March and October 2020 using the renowned Metaphor Identification Procedure (Pragglejaz Group 2007). This process basis its judgements of the metaphoricity of each word in a corpus on the contrast between its basic and contextual meaning. The results gathered from this technique reveal two main conceptual metaphors which are shared by both speakers: THE COVID-19 VIRUS IS A POWERFUL AGENT, which instils the virus with weight and power and must be stopped with restrictions which have object-like qualities, and THE PANDEMIC IS A JOURNEY – society is ‘moving towards’ normality and ‘follows’ scientific data as a ‘guide’ to get there. However, there is nuance between the two speakers: Johnson uses much more negatively valanced violence metaphors, such as ‘fight’ and ‘battle’, compared to Sturgeon who avoids these violent metaphors and foregrounds defence in words like ‘protect’. Based on previous metaphor research, I discuss the potential effect of these metaphors on public understanding of the crisis. This research can prompt future experimental studies which can examine the effect of these metaphors on reasoning, similar to Thibodeau and Boroditsky (2011), and also studies which compare COVID-19 metaphors used in other countries to examine cultural differences in metaphor use.

This individual article from the Proceedings is published here.