#covid is war and #vaccine is weapon? COVID -19 metaphors in I ndia (2021)

Abstract: Metaphors are creative cognitive constructs that are employed in everyday conversation to describe abstract concepts and feelings. Prevalent conceptual metaphors such as WAR, MONSTER, and DARKNESS in COVID-19 online discourse sparked a multi-faceted debate over their efficacy in communication, resultant psychological impact on listeners, and their appropriateness in social discourse. In this work, we investigate metaphors used in discussions around COVID-19 on Indian Twitter. We observe subtle transitions in metaphorical mappings as the pandemic progressed. Our experiments, however, didn’t indicate any affective impact of WAR metaphors on the COVID-19 discourse.

## introduction metaphors are cognitive artefacts to anchor one's thoughts and navigate a situation whether it is social, political or even financial. conceptual metaphors restructure an abstract domain in terms of a relatively concrete domain, influencing how we perceive reality @xcite . consider the conceptual metaphor, "dreams are butterflies". here, the abstract domain, dreams is mapped to a more concrete domain as that of butterflies evoking meanings such as vibrant and delicate. linguistic metaphors are the manifestations of these conceptual mappings in text. for instance, her eyes were full of vibrant dreams. india reported the first case of covid-19 infection in january, 2020 @xcite . soon after that, various control measures including the restriction on international travel, screening of air passengers and institutional quarantine were implemented to curb the infection. the government of india imposed the first nationwide lockdown 1 1 'coronavirus in india: 21-day lockdown begins; key highlights of pm modi's speech', business today (mar 25, 2020). available at link from mar 25, 2020 to apr 14, 2020 as a preventive measure to curb covid-19. various conceptual metaphors with source domains such as war (defeat the virus), ham-mer/landscape (flatten the curve) and even monster (grappling with virus) were used to communicate state's guidelines as well as reactions to situations arising due to the pandemic @xcite . in the mapping, covid-19 is war, healthcare staff have been reconceptualised as warriors, and the citizens as soldiers fighting unitedly against the enemy covid-19. flusberg et al. @xcite advocate the use of domain war to deliver urgent communication infused with motivation. consider another phrase "covid 2.0: threat of an administrative cytokine storm building up in india" foot_0 . here, administration's response is being compared to a biological phenomenon, cy-tokine storm to emphasize the lack of attention to ground-reality while drafting covid-19 protocols. this mapping does bundle subtle aspects such as failure to identify key points of action, overly restrictive protocols and its resultant undesired effect on citizens. another direction of research on covid-19 metaphors reflects on the appropriateness of these cognitive constructs in covid-19 discourse. there is widespread discontentment against re-imagining the pandemic using source domains such as war or monster which may negatively manipulate the understanding of the society. world emergency covid-19 ethics (wecope) committee advise against the use of war metaphors as it instills fear amongst masses and leads to stigmatization towards those who do not respect the guidelines @xcite . @xcite calls out the use of metaphors as an instrument by the state to defend its actions and policies during the pandemic. por-traying the pandemic as a war legitimizes stateimposed violence and excessive control. @xcite warns against the portrayal of covid-19 virus as mother nature's way to clean the planet. @xcite further demonstrated the illeffect of commonly used violent source domains such as war, monster in covid-19 discourse on public health. @xcite thus emphasizes the need to reframe covid-19 metaphors. @xcite speak in favour of correcting the war narrative in covid-19 discourse using substitute domains such as cricket and dance. inspired from this debate, we study the metaphors embedded in indian tweets posted during the pandemic. the main contributions of this study are: the rest of the paper is organized as follows. we discuss the prior works on conceptual metaphors in context of the ongoing global pandemic in section 2. we describe data collection and the procedure to frame different conceptual metaphors in section 3. section 4 discusses the evolving interpretation of mappings as well as the role of war metaphors on covid-19 discourse. we conclude our work in section 5. our work differs from the existing works in multiple ways. first, our work focuses on the covid-19 metaphors of india. we detect metaphorical tweets and also label the underlying conceptual mapping. we study the transition in the linguistic metaphors as the pandemic progressed. taking inspiration from weat @xcite , we measure affective influence of metaphorical tweets on covid-19 discourse as well as see if war metaphors indeed present a grimier picture. to the best of our knowledge, this is the first computational approach designed to understand metaphorical themes in india during the pandemic. ## conclusion collecting data for any figurative text related task is a big challenge. through this study, we release a hand-annotated set of 3.7k indian tweets for metaphor related research. a wide variety of conceptual mappings were used in indian newspapers while reporting covid-19 situation in india. nevertheless, we see a handful of these conceptual mappings in indian tweets. war, monster, darkness and game are the most prominent conceptual metaphors in indian tweets. our results reveal the shift in the use of conceptual metaphors as the pandemic progressed. despite intense discussions on the appropriateness of the conceptual mappings used during the pandemic, it is not evident from our experiments if war indeed led to an overly negative understanding of covid-19 in india.