Browsing by Author "Nzomo, Nancy Mwikali"

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    Unmasking Metaphors of COVID-19 Pandemic in Kenya’s Virtual Space: A Cognitive Linguistic Approach
    (International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS), 2024-10-29) Nzomo, Nancy Mwikali; Mwangi. Gachara; Itumo, Joshua
    The outbreak of COVID-19 in late 2019 led to the emergence of metaphorical framing. Life almost came to a standstill for more than two years. As a result, the entire world was engaged in combat with an elusive enemy widely seen as a warning sign. The study explored the metaphors employed in the fight against the virus in Kenya’s virtual space when it became a public health concern. Since this pandemic was the first in a century, people came up with new vocabulary and mental analogies to describe it. This study aimed to identify and describe the lexical items used in the Citizen TV Twitter handle, Kenya, to construct COVID-19 metaphors. The Conceptual Metaphor Theory by Lakoff and Johnson (1980/2003) was adopted in the study. The study utilized the descriptive qualitative research design. The data obtained from the Citizen TV Twitter handle, using Python code, was subjected to the Metaphor Identification Procedure developed by scholars at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam (MIPVU). This criterion identifies the metaphorically used linguistic items. The identified metaphors were classified into their domain following source-target domain analysis. Based on the selected metaphors, the macro domains obtained were WAR, PATH, and ORGANISM. The study revealed that conceptual metaphor was extensively employed in Kenya. Metaphors were found to be widespread in discussions on COVID-19. People consistently associate certain aspects of reality with others, transferring the characteristics of one domain to another. They naturally and instinctively think in terms of metaphors. The abundance of metaphors in the discourse around COVID-19 may have been employed to motivate Kenyans to confront the challenges presented by the pandemic and show how COVID-19 was conceptualized in Kenya
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    Unmasking Metaphors of Covid-19 Pandemic on Citizen TV’s Twitter Handle in Kenya: A Cognitive Linguistic Approach
    (Kenyatta University, 2025-05) Nzomo, Nancy Mwikali
    The outbreak of COVID-19 in late 2019, led to the emergence of metaphorical framing. Life almost came to a standstill for more than two years. As a result, the entire world was engaged in combat with an elusive enemy that was widely seen as a warning sign. The study explored the metaphors employed in the fight against the virus in Kenya when it became a public health concern. Since this pandemic was the first in a century, people came up with new vocabulary and mental analogies to describe it. The study was guided by the following objectives; Identifying and categorizing COVID-19 metaphors, analyzing the conceptual structure of COVID-19 metaphors, and finally describing the metaphorical micro domains informing the macro domains of COVID-19 metaphors. The conceptual Metaphor Theory (1980/2003) was used in the study. The research used both primary and secondary data. The secondary data obtained from the Citizen TV Twitter handle was subjected to the Metaphor Identification Procedure developed by scholars at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam (MIPVU). The criteria identifies the metaphorically used linguistic items. The identified metaphors were classified into their domain following source-target domain analysis. The corpus was then used to determine the micro domains of each conceptual metaphor. Online questionnaires through a link were sent to WhatsApp groups for the primary data which was used to determine the conceptual structure of the COVID-19 metaphor. The study utilized the qualitative research design. The findings and analysis of the research were presented using tables followed by descriptions of the objectives to show how COVID-19 was conceptualized in Kenya. The key findings reveal the prevalence of WAR metaphors, PATH metaphor and ORGANISM metaphor. The study recommends that public health communication strategies should be mindful of the potential impacts of such metaphors on public perception and behavior.