Università degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia

The article explores Sinophobic discourses during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing specifically on violence-related metaphors used to frame China in American and Australian newspapers from January to June 2020. Specifically, the analysis aims to investigate the extent to which violence-related metaphors were used to frame China in a micro-diachronic perspective and the functions they performed in the dataset. The investigation was conducted by combining corpus linguistics and discourse analysis approaches to analyse the semantic domain of violence. The results revealed that violence-related metaphors were extensively used to negatively frame China and its institutions in both corpora, although they were more frequent in the Australian corpus. From a micro-dia- chronic perspective, in the American corpus, violence-related metaphors were less recurrent and evenly distributed over time, whereas they peaked in May 2020 in the Australian corpus, a time that coincided with China’s imposition of substantial tariffs on Australian barley. This seemed to suggest that the use of such metaphors was highly influenced by socioeconomic factors rather than by the spread of COVID-19.

Although studies in the field of discourse analysis have revealed the presence of animal and violent metaphors in Sino-phobic discourses about China (Carrico, 2018; Lee, 2021), there are still no systematic studies focusing on metaphor and Sinophobia. This study aims at providing a further contribution to the studies of Sino-phobic discourses by focusing specifically on animal metaphors used to frame China during the COVID-19 pandemic in two corpora of American and Australian newspapers. The analysis combines methodologies of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis. First, a semantic domain analyses was carried out with WMatrix 5 (Rayson, 2008), then, metaphors in the semantic field of living creatures were identified and analysed adopting cognitive and discursive approaches. The results showed how predatory and threatening animals are often associated with Chinese institutions in the newspapers analysed and this negative metaphorical representation is juxtaposed to that of Australian institutions which are framed as harmless pets.