# How do media talk about the Covid-19 pandemic? Metaphorical thematic clustering in Italian online newspapers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.02106 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02106/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 2 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Framing COVID-19: How we conceptualize and discuss the pandemic on Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06986/) (2020)
- [Covid-19 Discourse on Twitter: How the Topics, Sentiments, Subjectivity, and Figurative Frames Changed Over Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08952/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The contribution presents a study on figurative language of the first months of the COVID-19 crisis in Italian online newspapers. Particularly, we contrast topics and metaphorical language used by journalists in the first and second phase of the government response to the pandemic in Spring 2020. The analysis is conducted on a journalistic corpus collected between February 24th and June 3rd, 2020. The analysis is performed using both quantitative and qualitative approaches, combining Structural Topic Modelling (Roberts et al. 2016), Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), and qualitative-corpus based metaphor analysis (Charteris-Black, 2004). We find a significant shift in topics discussed across Phase 1 and Phase 2, and interesting overlaps in topic-specific metaphors. Using qualitative corpus analysis, we present a more in-depth case study discussing metaphorical collocations of the topics of Economy and Society