COVID-19 in English and Persian: A Cognitive Linguistic Study of Illness Metaphors across Languages

This article investigates conceptual metaphors for Covid-19 in two languages, American English and Persian, using two approaches, namely Lakoff & Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory and Kövecses’s approach to universal metaphors. The data for the analysis were drawn from a large corpus of Covid-19 metaphors in American English and a smaller corpus extracted from major news websites in Persian. The analysis focuses on examining the source domains for the conceptual metaphors used and describe the most common conceptual metaphors. We discuss systematic similarities and differences between the two languages regarding the way Covid-19 is talked about and conceptualized and highlight some novel conceptual metaphors that only appear in Persian.