A Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis of the Metaphor COVID-19 IS AN ENEMY in English Language Saudi Online Newspaper Articles

Abstract

This dissertation studies the conceptual metaphor COVID-19 IS AN ENEMY in the English language Saudi online newspaper articles. The dissertation studies the main metaphor and its metaphorical entailments, and seeks to reveal the hidden ideologies behind the metaphor. The analysis framework of the dissertation is based upon corpus linguistics as well as critical discourse analysis, to provide both quantitative and qualitative findings. To do this, Saudi online news in relation to COVID-19 that were written in English language were collected and compiled to create a special corpus that contains 218,000 tokens; the results of the special corpus were compared to the corpus of coronavirus provided by the English-Corpora.org. To do the analysis, three stages of corpus critical discourse metaphor analysis was followed. The first stage is identifying war metaphors in the corpus. This is followed by the second stage, interpreting the main metaphor COVID-19 IS AN ENEMY. The last stage is about explaining the main metaphor, and reveal the secrets of using it through critical discourse analysis. The quantitative results show that war metaphors are highly frequent in the English language Saudi online newspaper (ELSON) corpus, with a percentage of 87% compared to the sample of the coronavirus corpus with 31%. The qualitative findings reveal that war metaphors were used to change peoples’ behaviors, to express solidarity and to acknowledge healthcare workers efforts. These findings lead to the conclusion that L1 does not affect how English language metaphors are conceptualized and used.