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The COVID-19 pandemic and changing meanings of flatten the curve: A cognitive semantic approach
被引:1
|作者:
Kang, Ji-in
[1
]
Kwon, Iksoo
[1
]
机构:
[1] Hankuk Univ Foreign Studies, 107 Imun Ro,Fac Bldg 512, Seoul 02450, South Korea
来源:
REVIEW OF COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS
|
2024年
/
22卷
/
02期
基金:
新加坡国家研究基金会;
关键词:
flatten the curve;
COVID-19;
semantic extension;
polysemy;
semantic frames;
frame metonymy;
D O I:
10.1075/rcl.00158.kan
中图分类号:
H0 [语言学];
学科分类号:
030303 ;
0501 ;
050102 ;
摘要:
This paper conducts a comparative analysis of the meanings of the phrase flatten the curve before and after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data from two corpora, the iWeb Corpus and the Coronavirus Corpus, it focuses on semantic frames (Fillmore, 1985) and frame metonymy (Dancygier & Sweetser, 2014). The investigation reveals that the construal of the phrase after the outbreak of COVID-19 requires the invocation of both bell curve and pandemic frames; that is, without the pandemic frame, the phrase would remain in the domain of statistics and refer to a change in a graph. The data are sorted into four semantic categories based on the context in which they appear (epidemiological/non-epidemiological) and on the effect they pursue regarding the flattening-the-curve scenario (rigorous/non-rigorous). The phrase's polysemy is explained by the part of the process for effect of the process metonymy. The flatter curve, as a salient part of a scenario, serves to refer to one of the scenario's effects. The analysis also observes a correlation between the real-world experience of the pandemic and the actual frequency of flatten the curve in that the ratio of each semantic category reflects the contemporaneous real-world significance of reducing the rate of increase of new infections.
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页码:505 / 540
页数:36
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