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Author ORCID Identifier

0000-0002-7744-318X

Abstract

The first case of the novel Covid-19 virus reached the island of Ireland in February 2020. The nation-focused response was one of the most striking characteristics that most countries shared throughout the pandemic. Corpus-linguistic research on Covid-19 communication is reasonably well established across various contexts. However, it is under researched in Ireland. Building trust and a successful national response is very much dependent on how heads of government confront health emergencies through public communications. Political leaders across the world often use metaphors in their speeches to strategically control their audiences’ perceptions of various topics. Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, Deputy Leo Varadkar and subsequently, Deputy Micheál Martin, who both served as Taoiseach, would take to the airwaves to formally address the nation in relation to Covid-19.

This project investigates metaphor in the speeches of both leaders, through the development of a systematic database of 25,823 words in the form of two corpora. These corpora contain the national addresses of both leaders during the Covid-19 pandemic. Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black, 2004) is applied to the speeches.

My findings indicate that Varadkar’s discourse employs war metaphors, casting the pandemic as a battle to be fought and won, whereas Martin conceptualises the crisis as a collective journey toward recovery. This paper highlights that metaphor was effective in encouraging solidarity, care, and compliance at the level of the nation-state in the Irish political responses to Covid-19. This study is exploratory in nature and provides an empirical evaluation of the argument that we can use systematic analyses of speeches, produced by the Department of the Taoiseach, to analyse metaphor.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

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