Unmasking Metaphors of COVID-19 Pandemic in Kenya’s Virtual Space: A Cognitive Linguistic Approach
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Date
2024-10-29
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International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS)
Abstract
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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Citation
Mwikali, N. N., Gachara, D. M., & Itumo, D. J. (2024). Unmasking Metaphors of COVID-19 Pandemic in Kenya’ s Virtual Space: A Cognitive Linguistic Approach. International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science, 8(10), 416-426.