Konceptualizacija koronavirusa u online novinskim člancima na bosanskom/hrvatskom/srpskom / Conceptualization of Coronavirus in Online Articles in Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic that broke out in Wuhan in late 2019 has had far-reaching consequences for the whole world. The world, both literally and metaphorically, stumbled into a war against COVID-19. War metaphors and metaphorical linguistic expressions such as naći se na prvoj liniji, boriti se, nevidljivi neprijatelj have flooded the media. The war metaphor has become an inevitable concept in the discourse of world officials and served them as a part of the scenario by which they legitimized and optimized the measures implemented to protect people and their lives. The paper analyses metaphorical linguistic expressions associated with coronavirus disease. Since the metaphor is not only a linguistic but also a cognitive phenomenon, these metaphorical linguistic expressions indicate the existence of the conceptual metaphor. Thus, it deals with an analysis on two levels: linguistic and cognitive. The research corpus consists of three corpora: (1) in Bosnian, (2) in Croatian and (3) in Serbian language. The first consists of online articles from Večernji list, the second from online articles from Dnevni avaz and Oslobođenje and the third from online articles from Nezavisne novine. The aim of the paper is to determine the dominant conceptualization of coronavirus disease in the above-mentioned articles. The approach to the analysis is cognitive and the method of analysis is the conceptual metaphor theory. In order to check metaphorical linguistic expressions, we will use the MIPVU procedure devised by a group of authors from the Vrije University (Steen et al. 2010: 25-26). For research purposes, we formulated three research questions the results of which have been in accordance with the expectations. In two corpora listed above, the dominant conceptualization of coronavirus is that of an enemy, while in one corpus the dominant conceptualization of coronavirus disease is that of a force.