All building

Berkeley Metaphor Group, with Prof. Eve Sweetser. 2020–2021.

Is a pandemic a war, a wildfire, or a flood? Each frame quietly tells you what to do. A war has enemies, front lines and sacrifice; a fire spreads, has hot spots and can be contained; a flood rises and recedes and has to be waited out. We studied which frames people reached for when talking about COVID-19, and how the choice of frame shaped their reasoning about health measures and tracked the political divide over the pandemic response. The work combined corpus analysis with online experiments.

It grew straight out of Linguistics 106, Sweetser’s metaphor course, where I’d read how “battle” and “journey” metaphors change what it’s like to live with cancer, and how calling crime a beast rather than a virus changes the policies people want.

Talk

Choosing source domains to guide metaphoric health reasoning. E. Sweetser, S. Laparle, K. Jones, D. Getter and A. Kulgod. RaAM 2021, the conference of the Association for Researching and Applying Metaphor, held online in June 2021.

Proposal

Hot Spots or Battle Grounds: A Conceptual Metaphor Analysis of the Polarization of the Covid Pandemic Response in the American Public, an undergraduate research proposal from September 2021.

My Ling 106 final paper, Vivekananda’s Metaphors at the Parliament of Religions, with its blending diagrams.