How do media talk about the Covid-19 pandemic? Metaphorical thematic clustering in Italian online newspapers

TL;DR

This study analyzes how Italian online newspapers used metaphorical language and shifted topics during the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic, revealing changes in discourse and metaphorical framing.

Contribution

It combines quantitative and qualitative methods, including topic modeling and metaphor analysis, to explore media language dynamics during the pandemic's early phase.

Findings

Significant topic shifts between pandemic phases

Overlap in topic-specific metaphors

In-depth analysis of Economy and Society metaphors

Abstract

The contribution presents a study on figurative language of the first months of the COVID-19 crisis in Italian online newspapers. Particularly, we contrast topics and metaphorical language used by journalists in the first and second phase of the government response to the pandemic in Spring 2020. The analysis is conducted on a journalistic corpus collected between February 24th and June 3rd, 2020. The analysis is performed using both quantitative and qualitative approaches, combining Structural Topic Modelling (Roberts et al. 2016), Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), and qualitative-corpus based metaphor analysis (Charteris-Black, 2004). We find a significant shift in topics discussed across Phase 1 and Phase 2, and interesting overlaps in topic-specific metaphors. Using qualitative corpus analysis, we present a more in-depth case study discussing metaphorical collocations of the topics of Economy and Society