Investigating the use of the "war" metaphor in domestic and foreign news texts related to the Covid-19 disease: Frame Semantic Theory

 According to the outbreak of Covid-19, experts and politicians are working to inform people completely about the crisis in their country and around the world. In the meantime, the use of the metaphor of "war" as a linguistic instrument is very common. Therefore, the present study examines the metaphor of "war" in the domestic and international news statements and texts related to the Covid-19 disease based on The Frame Semantics theory. This research is a descriptive- analytic research. To this end, the metaphors of the domestic news statements related to COVID-19 were selected from 20:30 news and online news, ISNA and IRNA, and the metaphors of the international statements related to COVID-19 were gathered from Guardian news, New York Times news and the website of Twitter. 500 metaphors in these texts were extracted through “Metaphor Identification Procedure” pattern suggested by Pragglejaz. Then, the metaphors located in the “disease” semantic frame and their frame elements were identified. The findings demonstrated that to create metaphors, the core and non-core elements of the frame play a more tangible semantic role. For example, the core element patient in the “disease” frame enters the "war" frame and plays the semantic role of one of the parties as the core element. On the other hand, the core elements of the frame such as case and purpose and non-core elements including duration, tools, method, position, size, result, time and place of war can get a role in the frame of disease.