Content uploaded by Ahmed Abdel-Raheem
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Ahmed Abdel-Raheem on Dec 25, 2023
Content may be subject to copyright.
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=csos20
Social Semiotics
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csos20
Where Covid metaphors come from: reconsidering
context and modality in metaphor
Ahmed Abdel-Raheem
To cite this article: Ahmed Abdel-Raheem (2021): Where Covid metaphors come
from: reconsidering context and modality in metaphor, Social Semiotics, DOI:
10.1080/10350330.2021.1971493
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2021.1971493
Published online: 08 Sep 2021.
Submit your article to this journal
View related articles
View Crossmark data
Where Covid metaphors come from: reconsidering context
and modality in metaphor
Ahmed Abdel-Raheem
English and Linguistics Department, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany
ABSTRACT
Pandemics such as Covid-19 are often described in terms of “wars”
or “waves”and “troughs.”But this imagery has its potential
shortcomings, and therefore a great many researchers and
commentators argue that we are thinking about the coronavirus
pandemic the wrong way, suggesting replacing the war or ocean
analogy with a better or particularly appropriate one, wildfire.
Yet, the rarely asked question is: Where do Covid-19 metaphors
come from? This type of metaphorical creativity, the so-called
context-induced metaphors, has been somewhat systematically
investigated in linguistic metaphor research, but not in the
literature on nonverbal and multimodal metaphor. I argue that
for context-induced creativity to be fully appreciated we need to
move beyond verbal metaphors, or verbal manifestations of
metaphor, and consider factors that commonly produce creative
multimodal metaphors. Will the evidence from multimodality
confirm or challenge the linguistic findings? There may be other
major possible sources of metaphorical creativity, ones based
more on visual or multimodal thinking, but which have not been
identified before because data from non-linguistic behavior had
not been examined. I thus show that there is a real gap in the
literature in that respect and my study of political cartoons fills
this both in terms of data and theory. In this article, I will limit
myself to the discussion of six motivational forces or contextual
factors (in no order of importance): (1) the immediate physical
environment, (2) the immediate cultural context, (3) the
immediate social setting, (4) knowledge about the major
elements participating in the discourse, (5) physical resemblance
between the source and target concepts, and (6) word plays and
literalizations of famous proverbs and idioms in a language.
Sometimes these factors work singly, but often in combination. It
is argued that these kinds of context, albeit involved in discourse
production and comprehension, do not control discourse as
cognitive context models do. Particularly interesting is that
among the thousands of books and articles on knowledge, so
little is said on the discursive sources of knowledge (besides
perception, personal experience, etc.), also about other cultures.
The possible implications of this study for metaphor theory,
multimodality, and intercultural communication are discussed.
KEYWORDS
Multimodal creativity;
context-induced metaphor;
context models; metaphor
variation; covid-19; social-
cultural cognition
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
CONTACT Ahmed Abdel-Raheem ahmedelsayed20017@gmail.com English and Linguistics Department, Uni-
versity of Bremen, Bremen, Germany
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2021.1971493.
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS
https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2021.1971493
1. Introduction
For an immediate grasp of the general issue I address in this paper, consider a cartoon
by Palestinian cartoonist Muhammad Sabaaneh originally posted on Facebook on 19
February 2021. The cartoon depicts Israel and Jews as snowmen, with Israeli settle-
ments as snow forts (Figure 1). The SNOW source concept is chosen here as a result
of Jerusalem’s rare experience of seeing its holy sites (the gold Dome of the Rock
and the Western Wall) under a blanket of snow on Thursday, 18 February 2021,
after an overnight snowstorm (Al-Jazeera, 18 February 2021). This is an example of a
“situated,”or probably better termed “context-dependent,”metaphor. This type of
metaphorical creativity has never been studied systematically, but it makes us think
about the interaction between context and metaphor, or rather the pragmatics of
metaphor use.
This study considers metaphor and motivation in the context of coronavirus. Impor-
tantly, there has been some work on the way people speak and think about Covid-19
(e.g. Semino 2021) but there has not yet been any discussion of the role of context in
shaping what people know and how they think about the pandemic. The aim of this
paper is thus to attempt to characterize some of the motivational forces that are involved
in this process. The focus will be on metaphors involving different modalities (in particu-
lar, metaphors in political cartoons) and on the interaction between metaphorical concep-
tualization and various kinds of context. This has implications both for conceptual
metaphor theory and cross-cultural sociopragmatics.
Initially, I will consider some previous research on context-induced creativity. My
corpus, terminology, and method of analysis will then be explained. A quantitative analy-
sis of the cartoons is conducted in Section 5, followed by a general discussion. The final
section lists some general conclusions and suggests some future directions for metapho-
rical creativity scholarship.
Figure 1. Sabaaneh Cartoon, 19 February 2021.
2A. ABDEL-RAHEEM
2. A brief review of the literature
The last decade has witnessed a rising interest in issues of creativity. This may be due to
the start of new journals such as Creativity Research Journal and The Journal of Creative
Behavior. However, there is still much to be done to better understand the creative
mind, or the interaction between conceptual systems and contexts. Particularly interest-
ing is how context may influence metaphorical conceptualization. Further research into
this type of creativity should also consider, at least, one overlooked issue: the role of non-
verbal communication. Aikhenvald et al. (2019) and Hoffmann (2020) fall prey to the same
criticism raised in connection with linguistic creativity.
The fact that metaphor is fundamentally multimodal has long been recognized within
the cognitive linguistic research. Despite this, detailed analysis of creative multimodal
metaphors has rarely featured in the metaphor literature, which has instead been domi-
nated by the analysis of verbal metaphors. Specifically, in their investigations of where
metaphors “really”come from, Kövecses (2010,2015) and Benczes and Ságvári (2018),
for example, focused on linguistic metaphors, and thus, quite strangely, ignored multimo-
dal metaphors. Despite his plea for a comprehensive treatment of metaphorical creativity,
Kövecses, like Benczes and Ságvári, tends to give the impression that multimodal meta-
phors are something that is of secondary importance, not worthy of consideration (as
also implied by his method’s name “the lexical approach”[e.g. Kövecses et al. 2019]).
For El Refaie (2019), however, the selected mode of representation both shapes how indi-
viduals express meanings and decides which terms become the tenor and vehicle of
metaphors in the first place, as well as which of these conceptual domains relate to
people’s embodied experience (42). Kövecses (2020a) mentions in passing that
“[c]ontext, including the physical situation, can provide conceptualizers with visual
images that can constitute the source domains of visual metaphors”(113) and does
not discuss its influence or role in the selection of metaphor in great detail. He does
not perform a formal corpus-linguistic data collection and analysis. Kövecses contents
himself with some more informal remarks on how visual experiences (whether sign-like
or non-sign-like) may evoke visual metaphors, citing El Refaie (2019) to indicate that in
visual or multimodal genres (e.g. paintings, advertisements, political cartoons, and sculp-
tures) both conceptual metaphors that have been identified mostly on the basis of linguis-
tic metaphors and ones that are specific to particular genres can be at work (for
differences in the linguistic and pictorial metaphors for the same target domain, in par-
ticular in relation to wine promotion discourses, see Caballero 2009). Despite using
slightly different terminology, the dynamic account of metaphor generation (Müller
2008; Cameron et al. 2009; Deignan and Cameron 2013; Gibbs 2017) is also essentially
concerned with metaphor production as a complex process that is influenced by a
range of different contextual forces, such as the wider cultural and historical conditions,
the particular social setting, one’sown bodily states and motivations, interactions with
others, cognitive and neural processes, and the immediate linguistic processing, all
working on different timescales (El Refaie 2019; on the differences between the two pro-
posals, cf. Kövecses 2020a). An exception to this dearth seems to be a study by Yahya
(2021). Her thesis applies Kövecses (2010) framework of “context-induced creativity”to
a (modestly sized) corpus of English cartoons pertaining to the financial crisis unfolding
in France. Yet, the corpus size (20 cartoons) and source of data (or the Euro-centric
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 3
approach to metaphorical creativity) may attract some fair criticism (for corpus size,
balance, and representativeness, see also McEnery, Xiao, and Tono 2006). Indeed, what
Kövecses only mentions in passing, and Benczes and Ságvári (2018) fail to mention
altogether, requires more data involving speakers of various languages (for “cultural
embodiment,”see Maalej 2004; cf. Yu 2009; Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2013). Scholars in cultural
studies might thus come under pressure to take into consideration major non-European
languages or artworks. After all, one never comes to see how exactly journalistic mental
models (van Dijk 2020) of an event (informally described as “frames”) are expressed in the
cartoon.
Hidalgo-Downing and Mujic’s(2020) edited volume, titled Performing Metaphoric Crea-
tivity Across Modes and Contexts, also seems eager to fill in the gap that preceding studies
have largely left unexamined. However, one would argue that this does not go far
enough. First, many of the papers in that volume are, at best, examining the role of
context in the comprehension of metaphors, but not in their production or creation. In
other words, their major concern is not with the issue of motivation, but with structure,
process, or meaning construction in metaphor (cf. also Veale, Feyaerts, and Forceville
2013, Part IV; El Refaie 2014). Second, they are not in fact fully discursive in the manner
of, say, discursive psychology (e.g. Edwards and Potter 1992). The word “discourse”
appears nearly 350 times in the book, but is never actually discussed as part of semantics.
The contribution by Pérez-Sobrino and Littlemore, “What makes an advert go viral? The
role of figurative operations in the success of Internet videos,”is a case in point. The
authors arguably made several unwise decisions in this enterprise. First, they did not
limit the topic to be studied to the relatively well-defined phenomenon of metaphor.
In their study, we learn about the potential role played by other incongruity-involving
operations besides metaphor, including irony, humor, euphemism, hyperbole, and under-
statement (which can work either in isolation or in combination with metaphor and meto-
nymy) in the popularization of an Internet advertisement (for the role of figurative
complexity in creativity, see also Hidalgo-Downing and Mujic 2011; for a review of
mixed findings concerning visual complexity and aesthetic preference, see Christensen,
Ball, and Reber 2020; compare also McDougall et al. 2016 on ease of icon processing
and prediction of icon appeal). Specifically, there are two major problems here. First,
tropes cannot always be demarcated reliably (Forceville 1996), as Pérez-Sobrino and Lit-
tlemore themselves realize. Pérez-Sobrino and Littlemore have skirted rather than
addressed the question of demarcation between tropes, however. If other analysts
want to test their findings or emulate them in new research, they then cannot know
the target of reliability that has been set in that paper. Second, popularity and creativity,
I claim, are two distinct, though related, terms. Obviously, a painting of nude Donald
Trump (e.g. by Illma Gore 2016) may “go viral,”even if it is not creative. That is, clamorous
attention-seeking is sometimes, but not always, the most effective of enterprises (Greenall
2001, 220). There are also movies that get rave reviews but just do not click with audi-
ences (e.g. 1958 baab al-H
adīid “Cairo Station [or The Iron Gate]”), and movies that
people love, but critics hate (e.g. 1986 BMX film Rad) (The Guardian, 12 July 2013).
Finally, the word “viral”in Pérez-Sobrino and Littlemore’s title was inappropriate and
an unfortunate choice given that “[t]he concept of disease is never innocent”(Sontag
1989, 84).
4A. ABDEL-RAHEEM
These weaknesses in the literature are revealing, and show the way to a more satisfac-
tory account. The present study, based on a large-scale corpus of Arab political cartoons,
thus revisits context-induced metaphorical creativity. In doing so, it takes the role of
context in the selection of metaphor more seriously and consequently dedicates itself
to a thorough multimodal analysis.
3. Creative metaphors
One crucial question that a few scholars, but not many, go into is the distinction between
creative metaphors (Black 1979) (sometimes, unfortunately, termed “image metaphors”
[Lakoffand Turner 1989, 89]), triggering novel or original, one-offmappings from a
vehicle to a tenor (such as Wallace Stevens”“A poem is a peasant”) and structural (con-
ventionalized/dead) metaphors or “metaphors we live by”(Lakoffand Johnson 1980),
naming correspondences that lay bare how one thing is systematically understood in
terms of another (such as “we”re at a crossroads”) (= LOVE AS JOURNEY).
Kövecses (2005,2015,2020a) distinguishes three types of creative metaphors: Source-
related, target-induced, and context-dependent creativity. There are two subtypes of
source-related creativity: “Source-internal”, involving cases that can be described as elab-
oration and extending (Lakoffand Turner 1989), and “source-external,”operating with the
so-called the “range of the target”phenomenon, where a particular target concept (e.g.
HAPPINESS) receives novel, additional vehicles (e.g. FLOWERS IN THE HEART) in its under-
standing. An example of source-internal creativity is Hamlet’s soliloquy “To sleep? Per-
chance to dream! Ay, there is the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may
come?”, where the ordinary conventional metaphor of DEATH IS SLEEP is extended to
include to the possibility of dreaming (Lakoffand Turner 1989). In contrast, target-
induced creativity refers to cases in which a target element (e.g. the possibility of
leaving the European Union) may “select”a source element that fits (e.g. fire-escape)
(but is not conventionally associated with it) (for further examples, see Mussolff2001).
Finally, context-induced creativity describes cases in which metaphors result from the
effect of the context on conceptualization. This type of metaphorical creativity is exem-
plified by the case of Emily Dickinson, an American poet with impaired vision, whose
knowledge about herself may have influenced her choice of metaphors (Kövecses
2010). Yet Abdel-Raheem (2021a) discusses another form of metaphorical creativity in dis-
course —creativity that involves a frame flouting or exploitation (or a violation of world
knowledge). A good example of this is the sentence “If Clinton were the Titanic, the
iceberg would sink”(Brandt 2004; Fauconnier and Turner 2002), which was coined in
the late 1990s, when the movie Titanic was popular and President Bill Clinton seemed
to survive impeachment over his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The
metaphorical blend CLINTION IS THE TITANIC, with THE LEWINSKY SCANDAL IS THE
ICEBERG, derives from the cultural context —i.e. it is a context-dependent metaphor.
The historical Titanic sank, but, surprisingly, in the text of the joke the Clinton-Titanic sur-
vives. The counterfactual, I argue, is a typical “role-reversal”ur-joke (Hofstadter and
Gabora 1989; Paolillo 1998), in which central elements of a frame (the Titanic and the
iceberg) are exchanged with regard to their normative roles in that frame (what I term
“frame-element exploitation”).
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 5
The focus of this paper is again on motivation (or context-induced creativity). I expand
Kövecses”definition of “motivation”to include any of the bodily and contextual par-
ameters that trigger, prompt, shape, or simply facilitate the choice and employment of
certain conceptual metaphors or their linguistic and non-linguistic manifestations. El
Refaie (2019), examining the graphic illness narrative genre (i.e. autobiographical
accounts in the visual medium of comics about either the author’s own or a family
member’s experience of disease), proposes that “some genres are more centrally con-
cerned with the human body than others, and that each genre exploits the affordances
of its modes and media in unique ways”(15). Importantly, she suggests that visual meta-
phors—the pictorial equivalents of examples in verbal texts that Grady (1999) calls
“resemblance”metaphors, such as “My bicycle is a horse”)—are “less constrained by
embodied experience and often are more creative and idiosyncratic than the type of
embodied “correlation”metaphors that have always been the focus of CMT”(El Refaie
2019, 87; double quotation marks in the original).
3.1. Context-induced metaphors
The way people use (understand and produce) metaphors in actual communicative situ-
ations is governed by a wide range of contextual factors, not all of equal weight. Of
these, Kövecses (2010,2015) considers the following: (1) the immediate physical
environment [comprising the physical events and their consequences, viewing arrange-
ment, salient characteristics of the environment, etc.], (2) what is known about the
major elements participating in the discourse [i.e. about the conceptualizer, the
target audience, and the topic], (3) the immediate cultural context [including the
various products of culture like TV shows and films, the dominant values and properties
of members of a group, or the entities found in a given physical-cultural environment],
(4) the immediate social setting [involving such distinctions as man vs. woman], and (5)
the immediate linguistic context itself [including the phonetic shape of a word in dis-
course]. In Kövecses (2020a), contextual factors that influence the (unconscious)
choice of source domains are regrouped into four categories: (1) situational context,
including the physical environment, the social setting, and the cultural situation; (2) dis-
course context, involving the linguistic context or co-text, information about the major
entities of a discourse, previous discourses on the same topic, and dominant forms of
discourse related to a subject matter; (3) conceptual-cognitive context, comprising the
metaphorical conceptual system, one’s ideology, knowledge about past events and
states, and differential interests and concerns about the world; and (4) bodily
context, or the body’s particular state (for sources of variation in embodied metaphor,
cf. Littlemore 2019). For clarity, Kövecses distinguishes between global contexts, corre-
sponding to the general knowledge that is socially shared by members of an epistemic
community and to what he calls culture, and local (immediate) contexts, subsuming the
particular parameters that affect metaphorical conceptualization in a particular commu-
nicative event (for global and local contexts, or the situation hierarchy, compare van Dijk
2008,2014).
First in order of importance, especially in influencing metaphorical conceptualization,
is cultural history or “differential memory”(defined as “the memory of events and
objects shared by a community or of a single individual”[Kövecses 2015, 52]) (Kövecses
6A. ABDEL-RAHEEM
2005; Schmidt and Brdar 2012; Freeman 2017; Kuczok 2016). Some, however, place an
emphasis on social factors, such as socio-economic status and media consumption,
thus raising doubts about the overall dominance of cultural history (Ashton 1994;
Benczes and Ságvári 2018; Bosch 1984; Camp 2006; Gibbs and Gerrig 1989; Givón
2005; Shinjo and Myers 1987; Stern 2000). For van Dijk (2014), on the other hand, the
production as well as comprehension of metaphors is defined not by the social
context itself, but by “the way the participants define these context parameters in
their context [experience] models [featuring a spatiotemporal Setting, a Participant
structure, a Knowledge device, etc. (see also Hymes 1974)]”(295). In other words, it is
through the cognitive mediation of experience models that social characteristics (age,
social class, etc.) can influence the structures and variations of discourse. Thus, cognitive
context models are claimed to be the basis of a theory of both pragmatics and socio-
linguistics. For van Dijk, it is possible to add further “contexts”(e.g. social, political, his-
torical, etc.), which all may be involved in discourse production and comprehension, but
they do not “control”discourses (or stories, etc.) as the communicative context model
does. Of course, they are also mentally mediated, namely through the memories, knowl-
edge of the speakers —for instance as construed through a life of reading or watching
the news or reading books, and so on. In other words, other forms of context, such as
social, political, cultural, historical, etc. seem to be different, and need to be accounted
for in terms of knowledge (of the world), on the one hand, and maybe in terms of ideol-
ogies (e.g. when antiracists are influenced by an antiracist ideology, feminists by a fem-
inist one, etc.). And, obviously, this epistemic and ideological influence is to be defined
for epistemic communities and ideological groups —but again as personally “applied”
by each speaker, so as to be able to account for the fact that each feminist speaks as a
feminist in her own way. In other words, this requires a combination of personal event
models, context models, general knowledge, and so on. For this, it is important to sep-
arate notions from cognitive psychology, in particular mental models, and concepts
from cognitive linguistics, such as frames, image schemas, and idealized cognitive
models (see also van Dijk 2020). Cognitivists such as Zoltán Kövecses and Christopher
Hart often mix these in various ways —which is, at best, confusing and, at worst,
barren. The notion of “mental model”was introduced at the same time in books of
1983 by Johnson-Laird and van Dijk’s book with Kintsch, but rather different in their
psychological uses. Van Dijk and Kintsch used the notion to account for the coherence
of discourse about events, such as stories or news reports, whereas Johnson-Laird
employed it to account for problems of logic and inference (e.g. to explain that “to
the right of”, when describing people around a round table, is not transitive). Mental
models may be about events in which the speaker participates, like in many personal
stories, or to understand the stories of others (as in news reports). In recent publications,
van Dijk has generalized the notion to experience models, for any experience. Context
Models are again a special case of experience models (defining all events of our every-
day lives), namely mental representations of the communicative situation in which we
talk, write, listen or read. Besides the usual categories of Time, Place, Participants (and
their identities, roles and relations), van Dijk has added a crucial category of Knowledge,
to account for all aspects of common ground, presuppositions, and the fundamental
mechanisms of interaction, communication and discourse, as forms of information man-
agement. One problem with context models as cognitive constructs, however, is that
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 7
they remain, in the long run, subject to experimental demonstration that has not yet
been provided. After all, a scholar’s paradigmatic and methodological choices can
“skew […] actual differences and, in worst case scenarios, even creat[e] the appearance
of differences where none exist at all”(Lampert and Ervin-Tripp 1998, 231). Importantly,
one problem with Kövecses”study of journalistic and literary metaphors is its reliability:
he engaged on an individual basis with his object of investigation. Not only can con-
cerns be expressed here over the absence of an explicit method for linguistic metaphor
identification, but one may also cast doubts on results that are obtained on the basis of
introspection and/or the random collection of instances (for corpus-based approaches to
metaphor and metonymy, see Stefanowitsch and Gries 2006; Stefanowitsch 2020). In any
event, Kövecses”lexical approach is simply inapplicable to visual or multimodal data
given that it relies on the lexical information available in dictionaries (Kövecses et al.
2019, 151). As elsewhere in cognitive linguistics, the lexical approach to metaphor
also deals only with words and little sentences without co-text, communicative
context or sociocultural contexts. To say this is to advocate a “discourse analytic”para-
digm, “address[ing] discourse-level matters related to lager stretches of talk and text
beyond the word or sentence level, including questions of participant, topic, function,
and discourse structure”(Cotter 2001, 418). After all, as pointed out above, Kövecses”
(2020a) discussion of visual metaphors is made in passing during a discussion of
visual experiences.
These findings have implications both for conceptual metaphor theory (CMT)—as
they suggest that there are metaphors that derive neither from correlations in experi-
ence (for correlation metaphors) nor from resemblances between experiential
domains (for resemblance metaphors), but from the context of metaphorical conceptu-
alization (for context-induced metaphors)—and a variety of issues in the study of
poetry, as they show that we can move beyond some limited, and limiting, approaches
to the interpretation of poems (Kövecses 2010). The weaker conclusion, says this cogni-
tivist, would be that potential similarities between elements are legion, but what helps
(triggers, prompts, and so on) people select or use a source concept would be a contex-
tual factor. This seems to be in tune with dynamic systems theory (e.g. Cameron et al.
2009; Deignan and Cameron 2013; Sharifian 2017), which postulates that conceptual
metaphors arise from the continuous interplay of sociocultural constraints, neural pro-
cessing, and the ongoing, present sensorimotor experiences, thus rejecting the long-
held notion that people select metaphorical concepts from a limited set of pre-stored
conceptual mappings (El Refaie 2019).
Then, for an extended, more comprehensive, and improved version of CMT, not only
a much more elaborate contextual component than has hitherto been proposed for the
theory but also a component that can account for the actual usages of metaphors in
natural discourse is required (Kövecses 2020b). In fact, even the cognitive aspect of
CMT has to be refined, and most significantly, the theory must be changed in such a
way that all these suggested modifications can be integrated into a unified and coher-
ent framework of metaphor (Kövecses 2020b). Indeed, scholars in cognitive linguistics
argue that they do not strictly distinguish between (word?) meaning and knowledge,
but they do not offer a coherent theory of how knowledge is represented in the
brain or mind. Apparently, we know a lot about, say, restaurants, but does this mean
that when we read or hear the word restaurant in a text or conversation all this
8A. ABDEL-RAHEEM
knowledge is activated (in the milliseconds we use to read and understand a word)?
Indeed, if there is no difference, there is no sense in speaking of the “mental lexicon”,
because then there is no lexicon, but only knowledge fragments associated to words
(see van Dijk 2020).
4. Corpus and methodology
The data for this study consist of 2,279 political cartoons pertaining to the pandemic and
published between 1 January 2020 and 24 June 2021 in Egypt’s two oldest and largest-
circulation newspapers Al-Ahram and Al-Akhbar and on the websites of the first Arab sati-
rical magazine Tomato Cartoon, which also brings the cream of foreign cartoonists to
Arabs, and Cartoon Movement, which describes itself as a global network of more than
500 cartoonists from all over the world. Table 1 summarizes the annotated datasets.
Political cartoons are ideal for the study of metaphor, since one of their defining prop-
erties is the metaphorical combination of imaginary scenarios and real-world events and
circumstances (El Refaie 2009). Furthermore, they are rarely of a purely visual nature (El
Refaie and Hörschelmann 2010), and therefore provide an excellent corpus for examining
more closely the phenomenon of multimodal metaphor. But this should not be taken to
mean that political cartoons are easier to comprehend than purely verbal texts. Rather,
evidence is growing that reading cartoons is a complex process that requires several
different kinds of literacies (Abdel-Raheem 2020; El Refaie 2009). Finally, note that even
relatively fine genre differences such as the ones between political cartoons, advertise-
ments, and graphic illness narratives motivate metaphor variation (both in frequency
and pictorial metaphor forms). This is also why some genre researchers are beginning
to pay attention to “the affordances of the different modes and media, and the unique
constraints imposed by each of these on the schematic structure, content, and style of
a communicative event or artifact”(El Refaie 2019, 52).
Given that all interpretation begins with finding how a message can achieve relevance
(Abdel-Raheem 2020; van Dijk 2014; Forceville 2020), the first step to visual metaphor
identification is to assess what “scenario”is (verbo)visualized in a cartoon, or an advertise-
ment, and then register if, and if so what, deviates from this scenario. The questions for-
mulated in Abdel-Raheem (2021b) (e.g. “Create a (verbo)visual FrameNet”, where the task
is to define all pictorial elements relative to conceptual frames) only then can help fine-
tune the analysis. Thus, one’s take on the Samsonite advertisement discussed in Forceville
(2020), where three ice-hockey players are depicted using Cosmolite suitcases as if they
were icehockey sticks, would be: Once the viewer realizes that this is an advertisement
for Samsonite, s/he realizes that the hockey stick is not to be taken literally. The next ques-
tion would be: “Can/must we interpret this as a visual/multimodal metaphor or is there a
different reason for it—is it another trope (hyperbole? irony? a visual pun? nonsense?)?”
To complicate matters, metaphor can operate not only singly, but also in combination
with other tropes. Thus, the most crucial first step is to determine who depicts what to
whom under what conditions, why and in what way (for a detailed discussion, see
Abdel-Raheem 2021b).
There were two stages to the analysis: a qualitative phase to identify metaphor in context
and a quantitative phase to identify the single most important factor in the selection of a
metaphorical source domain. Both were done manually. All the cartoons were analyzed
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 9
Table 1. Annotated data
Cartoonist Age Gender Nationality Sample size
Muhammad Sabaaneh 43 Male Palestinian 79
Alaa Allagta 49 Male Palestinian 42
Hani Abbas 43 Male Palestinian 21
Safaa Odah 37 Female Palestinian 50
Omayya Joha 44 Female Palestinian 49
Mikail ÇİFTÇİ50 Male Turkish 45
Halit Kurtulmus Aytoslu 51 Male Bulgarian-Turkish 20
Musa Keklik 40 Male Turkish 13
Ahmad Rahma 43 Male Arab-Turkish 75
Hilal Özcan 43 Female Turkish 24
Menekse Cam 55 Female Turkish 8
Amr Fahmy 53 Male Egyptian 55
Ahmed Ka3oud 42 Male Egyptian 3
Maher Rashwan –Male Egyptian 61
Sherif Arafa 41 Male Egyptian 10
Tarek Ngm –Male Egyptian 2
Amr Okasha –Male Egyptian 1
Doaa Eladl 42 Female Egyptian 140
Houida Ibrahim 42 Female Egyptian 11
Ghada Mustafa –Female Egyptian 5
Amany Hashem 42 Female Egyptian 11
Samah Farouk 37 Female Egyptian 37
Nora Makram –Female Egyptian 25
Naji Benaji 54 Male Moroccan 6
Abdulla Derkawi 51 Male Moroccan 128
Jalal Hajir 42 Male Moroccan 12
Riham El Hour 44 Female Moroccan 29
Alajili Alabidi 51 Male Libyan 70
Mo Gajoum –Male Libyan 43
Yaser Ahmad 43 Male Syrian 51
Fahd el-BiHadi –Male Syrian 3
Habib Hadad –Male Lebanese 1
Hassan Bleibel 58 Male Lebanese 137
Dalal El-ezzi Kaissi –Female Lebanese 4
Ali Khalil 39 Male Bahraini 54
Osama Hajjaj 48 Male Jordanian 87
Saad al-Muhanadi –Male Qatari 4
Amna Al Hammadi –Female Emirati 25
Emad Hajjaj 54 Male Jordanian 85
Nasser al-Jaafari 51 Male Jordanian 25
Amjad rasmi 48 Male Jordanian 78
Rafat Alkhatib –Male Jordanian 25
Nasser Ibrahem 44 Male Iraqi 22
Al Subaey –Male Qatari 67
Muhammad Thalaab –Male Kuwaiti 73
Fahd al-Khamisi –Male Saudi 14
Amin Al-Habarah –Male Saudi 15
Hana Hajjar 41 Female Saudi 4
Rashad Alsamei 45 Male Yemini 22
Amine Labter 39 Male Algerian 6
Siham Zebiri 38 Female Algerian 18
Rodrigo de Matos 46 Male Portuguese 30
Darío Castillejos 47 Male Mexican 20
Vitor Neves –Male Portuguese 8
ZACH 25 Male Filipino 8
Antonio Rodríguez 56 Male Mexican 15
Tjeerd Royaards 41 Male Dutch 21
Guido Kühn 54 Male German 28
Harm Bengen 66 Male German 161
Paolo Calleri 50 Male German 73
Rainer Hachfeld 82 Male German 10
Stellina Chen –Female Taiwanese 10
10 A. ABDEL-RAHEEM
in depth, but one is only able to present a few examples in this paper; these were selected as
they were particularly striking and explicit in terms of the motivational basis of metaphor.
Not only did the adoption of a corpus methodology enable me to arrive at results that are
exhaustive and reliable, but it also helped me find a fairly large number of relevant
examples. Following standard conventions in cognitive linguistics, conceptual domains,
metaphors, and metonymies are written in small capitals, e.g. ISRAEL AS COVID-19.
5. Analysis
5.1. Physical environment
Stark differences exist in the physical environment or setting (comprising the particular
geography, landscape, fauna and flora, temperature, weather, dwellings, physical circum-
stances, viewing arrangement, salient qualities of the environment, etc.) in which people
live (for “different locales,”cf. Barsalou 1999), and because individuals (mostly uncon-
sciously) get attuned to these acute differences and variations, the metaphors that
people from different cultures or backgrounds employ will also vary (Kövecses 2015). In
other words, the selection and employment of particular metaphors in discourse can
be influenced by the immediate physical setting in which a communicative exchange
occurs, including, among possibly other things, “the physical events and their conse-
quences that make up or are part of the setting, the various aspects of the physical
environment, and the perceptual qualities that characterize the setting”(102; see also
Boers 1999; Semino 2008). For example, Eiman al-Mutairi, head of Saudi Arabia’s National
Competitiveness Center and assistant minister of commerce and investment, said at last
year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos “Saudi Arabia wants to act immediately on
these changes because we believe that we can actually spread this good virus to our
region, to neighbors.”The phrase “spread this good virus”exemplifies both an oxymoron,
operating by juxtaposing two incongruous words (“good”and “virus”), and a metaphor,
HAVING A POSITIVE IMPACT ON OTHER SOCIETIES AS TRANSMISSION OF “GOOD”
VIRUS. I suggest that the coronavirus pandemic may have influenced the choice of meta-
phors in al-Mutairi’s speech, both at the conceptual level and the level of the particular
linguistic expression she uses. In a similar fashion, the noun “vaccine”in the Guardian
headline “We need to develop a vaccine against media scare tactics”(The Guardian,14
February 2021) is selected by the journalist, David Mitchell, as a result of the physical
health impacts of Covid-19 or its then (still) social consequences the world never foresaw.
5.1.1. Physical circumstances/topical news stories
5.1.1.1. COVID-19. The picture displayed in Figure 2a, by male Palestinian cartoonist
Muhammad Sabaaneh (Tomato Cartoon, 25 September 2020), depicts the Dome of the
Rock in Jerusalem (DOME OF THE ROCK FOR JERUSALEM) located between a massive
green helmet of an Israeli soldier (a metonym for the Israeli army) and a giant green cor-
onavirus (ISRAEL AS COVID-19). The caption reads: “Jerusalem between two viruses.”The
cartoon is an example of a “pictorial simile”, where both the source (CORONAVIRUS) and
target (ISRAELI ARMY) are pictorially portrayed in their entirety as two separate figures but
in a way that highlights their resemblance or equivalence (Forceville 1996; see also Gkiou-
zepas and Hogg 2011). Similarly, the cartoon in Figure 2b, also by Sabaaneh (Tomato
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 11
Cartoon, 24 March 2020), shows a gunman wearing a green coronavirus-like military
uniform, leading what appears to be a prisoner by a rope. The caption says: “Palestinian
prisoners [in Israeli jails].”The cartoon exemplifies a “hybrid metaphor”(ISRAELI SOLDIER
AS CORONAVIRUS), where both disparate conceptual domains (CORONAVIRUS and
ISRAELI SOLDIER) are visually fused into one overall figure (Forceville 1996; see also Gom-
brich 1971; Carroll 1994,1996; Gkiouzepas and Hogg 2011). Finally, the cartoon displayed
in Figure 2c, by Mahmoud alrifai, coins the phrase “COVID-1948”, with “48”highlighted in
red. The phrase appears next to a coronavirus-shaped Israeli flag, all against a black back-
ground (“hybrid metaphor”). “1948”is the year Israel was created (“historical event
knowledge”).
The characterizations of Israel (and America) as the CORONAVIRUS are found fre-
quently in the Arab and Turkish samples (accounting for 64 occurrences, out of 1895 car-
toons), especially the works of Palestinian cartoonist Muhammad Sabaaneh and Turkish
artist Mikail ÇİFTÇİ(accounting for 22 and 6 occurrences respectively). In all such cases,
the connotations mapped from source (CORONAVIRUS) to target (ISRAEL) can be formu-
lated as “fast-spreading”,“threatening the lives of millions of people,”and “no return to
normal for the foreseeable future.”In May 2021, Israel killed two hundred Palestinians,
including 59 children, and displaced about 34,000 Palestinians from their homes during
a week of attacks in Gaza (The Guardian, 17 May 2021). The real number may be far
higher. And yet there is another parallel: both Covid-19 and Israel are causing a lot of
social isolation. In April 2021, a 213-page report by Human Rights Watch accused Israel
of committing the crimes of apartheid and persecution against Palestinians (Human
Rights Watch 2021). For more than a decade, the tiny Gaza Strip has arguably been in
an artificial state of lockdown under a crippling Israeli blockade. In this sense, the
Israeli blockade and restrictions on Gaza correspond to strict coronavirus restrictions.
The low –or specific-level mapping ISRAEL AS COVID-19 also answers questions such
as how the virus transmits, how to protect oneself and others from Covid infection,
whether a vaccine or treatment is available, whether it is possible to eradicate the
Figure 2. Coronavirus as source domain.
12 A. ABDEL-RAHEEM
coronavirus/Israel, etc. Strong implicatures include typically that unless the (Arab) world
works to eradicate Covid-Israel, new (variant) strains are bound to emerge.
Importantly, such categories as illness,virus, and Covid-19 can be organized into levels.
Illness is at the superordinate level, virus at the basic level, and Covid-19 at the subordinate
level. That is, ISRAEL AS COVID-19 is a more specific version of a general disease metaphor.
The former is novel and creative, motivated by the physical circumstances, and the latter
entrenched, conventional. In the heat of despair over the American war in Vietnam, Susan
Sontag, a breast cancer patient and one of America’s intellectual icons, described the
white race as “the cancer of human history.”The coronavirus metaphor, like the cancer
metaphor, oversimplifies complex stories. But there is a large difference between corona-
virus and cancer metaphors, as the diseases have quite different causes and prevention
and treatment are different. While the use of cancer metaphors to represent societal
ills is not remarkable anymore, the use of pandemic metaphors to represent societal ills
is very new and emerging, just like the disease (Abdel-Raheem 2021c). As Sontag wrote
in her 1989 book, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors, illness metaphors
may be hard to resist for those wishing to register indignation, but “[t]he people who
have the real disease are also hardly helped by hearing their disease’s name constantly
being dropped as the epitome of evil”(85).
At the moment, the world has virus variants on its mind and this too translates into
cartoons. Consider an image by Jordanian cartoonist Emad Hajjaj originally posted on
Facebook on 14 January 2021. The cartoon features two red-toothed bats wearing
explosive vests, holding daggers, with parts of their wings transformed into parts of
guns and bombs, and haloed by coronavirus particles (Figure 1c). The bat on the
right side of the image is nearly-black navy blue, with white eyes and pinna, and
bears a fluttering black-and-white Isis flag, with the white banner at the top of the
flag reading “Variant 1”and the white circle in the middle of it represented by a coro-
navirus particle. The bat on the left is black-and-brown, with yellow eyes and pinna, and
raises a yellow flag with the words “Variant 2”emblazoned across the top in black in a
somewhat coarse, handwritten Arabic script and a coronavirus particle with three gun-
shaped spike proteins in the middle. The caption reads, “Militant groups are like corona-
virus”, with the hashtag # Iraq. In Arab culture, terrorism is conventionally associated
with bats, which are active at night (a symbol of evil). However, the information that
the novel virus almost certainly originated in bats also plays a role in the selection of
the metaphor.
In times of pandemic, misinformation flourishes. Scientists work around the world to
determine the likely cause and origin of Covid-19 or the truth of claims that the novel cor-
onavirus was manmade. For some, suggestions that the pandemic is a hoax or was started
deliberately are the latest chapter in a tale of blame, disinformation, fake news, and finger-
pointing. Information linking the coronavirus to 5G telecoms, Chinese labs, or to the
Jewish community, even if false, is widely shared on social networks. Interestingly, a
survey of about 26,000 people in 25 countries designed in collaboration with the Guardian
found that significant numbers in Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia believed that the virus
had not emerged naturally, but had been engineered by the Chinese or US government
(Henley and McIntyre 2020). The survey also showed widespread and significant anti-vac-
cination sentiment, a matter of serious concern to wise governments that are roaring
ahead with ambitious inoculation drives. This all makes social psychologists wonder
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 13
why the global pandemic is such fertile ground for conspiracy theories—not only about
the origin, but also severity and prevention of Covid-19.
The sheer frequency of occurrences of CORONAVIRUS and VACCINE metaphors (13 per
cent) is in itself regarded as evidence of the role of physical events and circumstances in
shaping what people know and how they think about the world (see Abdel-Raheem
2021c). Illness metaphors may be hard to resist for those wishing to register indignation
(Sontag 1989). In the heat of despair over the American war in Vietnam, Sontag herself
once wrote that “the white race is the cancer of human history.”However, patients are
also hardly helped by hearing the name of their disease “constantly being dropped as
the epitome of evil”(Sontag 1989, 85).
5.1.1.2. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the time of coronavirus, a cartoon by male
Palestinian artist Muhammad Sabaaneh (Figure 3a) has depicted a doctor using his
stethoscope in the same way as a demonstrator uses a sling to hurl stones at Israeli sol-
diers. The caption reads: “Heroes of the moment”. The metaphor could be verbalized as
HEALTHCARE PROFESSIONAL AS PALESTINIAN STONE-THROWER, with CORONAVIRUS
AS ENEMY/OCCUPIER and STETHOSCOPE AS SLINGS. This is an example of an “integrated
metaphor”(El Refaie 2019), where an object (the stethoscope) is represented in a way that
strongly suggests something else (hurling rocks using a sling). The metaphor is chosen
not just because of physical resemblance between the stethoscope and the sling, but
also because of the effects of Israel’s 73-year occupation of the Palestinian territories.
Images of Palestinian youths and children using slingshots have become symbolic of
the resistance to the Israeli military occupation. In Figure 3b (by male Palestinian cartoo-
nist Alaa Allagta, 25 March 2020), a slingshot (a metonym for a Palestinian resisting Israeli
troops) and a stethoscope (a metonym for doctors risking their own lives to care for the
sick) are depicted next to one another. The caption reads: “Resisting the occupation and
fighting the pandemic are jihad.”The positions of the slingshot and the stethoscope are
strikingly similar. Moreover, the resemblance between the two is reinforced by the
caption. But while the Sabaaneh cartoon is a case of hybrid metaphor, the Allagta
cartoon is a case of pictorial simile (HEALTHCARE WORKER is like PALESTINIAN STONE-
THROWER). In both cases, the metaphor is after all created as a result of the current phys-
ical circumstances in occupied Palestine. The question of whether it makes sense to apply
conflict metaphors to medicine has been extensively discussed by theorists and critics. For
Figure 3. Metaphorical creativity and current circumstances: Israel-Palestine conflict.
14 A. ABDEL-RAHEEM
Guardian columnist Steven Poole, one implication of the ALL DOCTORS AND NURSES AS
HEROES metaphor is that medical professionals are not in need of help, and that those
who die fighting coronavirus are more heroic than those who survive their encounters
with patients. The metaphor is also misleading because non-medical professionals,
albeit not on the frontline, may become casualties.
5.1.1.3. The year of the ox. On the first day of the lunar Year of the Ox, 12 February 2021,
female Taiwanese cartoonist Stellina Chen caricatured Shih-chung Chen, the minister of
health and welfare, riding and vaccinating a bull against Covid (Figure 4). The bull is exhal-
ing heavily and hitting the virus with the tail. In Chinese mythology, the ox is not only
large and powerful, but also stubborn and determined. Especially relevant is also the audi-
ence’s knowledge about the current date or Chinese new year celebrations. This particular
concrete event is also accessible to the public with a reminder cue—the caption “How we
start the year of the Ox.”The cartoon targets the Taiwanese people, as addressed by the
deictic expression “we.”The cartoonist is probably giving the government scores for the
efforts it makes to ensure the country gets vaccines. The Year of the Ox thus seems to be a
fitting metaphor for how Taiwan may triumph against Covid. More importantly, it is the
temporal setting that facilitates the choice of the metaphor TAIWAN AS BULL. In other
words, the metaphor is based on the context model of the participants, featuring the
Setting (Time: expressed by the date of publication—12 February 2021; Space: expressed
by “we”), Participants (and their identities: Stellina Chen and the Taiwanese people), and
Aims (backing the government in its effort to contain the virus).
5.2. Cultural setting
5.2.1. Physical-Cultural entities
The choice of a particular metonymic symbol or source domain may also in part be motiv-
ated by the cultural context, which denotes “the unique and salient concepts and values
that characterize particular (sub)cultures—together with the governing principles of a
Figure 4. The Year of the Ox, a cartoon by Stellina Chen.
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 15
given culture or subculture”(Kövecses 2015, 101). For instance, Figure 5a(Hany Tolba
Cartoon, 7 March 2020) shows the Great Sphinx of Giza (a metonym for Egypt) wearing
a face mask. The caption says, “Flights [to and] from China resume.”Due to its cultural
and historical salience, the Sphinx (and pyramids) became a metonymic symbol for
Egypt. As a metonym, it is set up in part as a result of the local and global cultural
influence (Riad 2018). The metonymy THE SPHINX FOR EGYPT is a specific-level version
of the generic-level metonymy a CHARACTERISTIC FEATURE FOR THE PLACE IT CHARAC-
TERIZES. The metaphor must be construed as something like THE GIZA SPHINX AS COVID-
19’S LIKELY VICTIM. In a similar fashion, the cartoon in Figure 5b, by male Yemini cartoo-
nist Rashad Alsamei, portrays a gloved hand cutting a coronavirus particle in half with a
mask-shaped jambiya, a traditional Yemeni dagger. The metaphor can be rendered verb-
ally as FACE MASK AS JAMBIYA. The jambiya is a physical-cultural element, which made it
a natural choice for a metonymic symbol for Yemen. It has also triggered or facilitated the
selection of the conceptual metaphor.
Similarly, in Figure 5c (by male Iraqi cartoonist Nasser Ibrahim), a doctor wearing a
stethoscope, white coat, mask, and gloves is portrayed as a knight with a bow and
arrow, aimed at the coronavirus. The cartoon is an allusion to the story of Ashurbanipal,
great Assyrian king and one hell of a lion hunter. Specifically, it is a reference to a lion-hunt
scene from the North Palace at Nineveh (near Mosul), Iraq. As a salient feature of the Iraqi
landscape, the picture of King Ashurbanipal, the warrior ruler of the 7th century BC, was
selected to describe doctors and nurses fighting the pandemic (DOCTOR AS ASHURBANI-
PAL; CORONAVIRUS AS LION). Consider also Figure 5d (by female Egyptian cartoonist
Doaa Eladl), where a medical professional wearing a face visor or shield, in addition to
a mask, is depicted as a horseman stabbing Covid-19 with a spear. As a Cairene, Eladl
Figure 5. Physical-cultural entities/elements.
16 A. ABDEL-RAHEEM
is familiar with the Coptic Quarter where the Hanging Church (al- Muallaqa church)
houses early Christian pictures of St George slaying the dragon, to which her cartoon
alludes. Slaying the terrible predator is an act of great heroism, in which St George
(medical personnel) seems to succeed. Healthcare professionals come to epitomize
ideals of selflessness and valor in slaying the virus. Given that the picture of Saint
George and the dragon is a significant symbol or physical-cultural entity, it was a
natural choice for the cartoonist (HEALTHCARE WORKER AS SAINT GEORGE; CORONAS-
VIRUS AS THE DRAGON). Note that Paolo Calleri, a German cartoonist with a master’sin
folklore and fine arts from the University of Augsburg, has a preference for metaphors
drawing on heroic tales or the stuffof innumerable legends in the medieval world and
so it is no surprise that one of his Covid cartoons is also based on the same source
domain, George killing the dragon, but with Bavarian colors. This means that a cartoonist’s
choice of metaphor may also be influenced by his or her professional interests (see § 5.4.).
Importantly, a cartoon of the same event will always be different when drawn by a
different cartoonist. Put another way, the production and comprehension of metaphor
is influenced by the structures of dynamic and situationally variable context models, fea-
turing cartoonists”social attitudes and ideologies—and indirectly their nationality, and
social class, among other factors—the representation of the reading public as recipients
of the political cartoons, and so on.
Outside the context of the pandemic, the occurrence of the PERSON AS PHYSICAL-CUL-
TURAL ELEMENT (e.g. MOSQUE, PYRAMID, and OLIVE TREE) is also frequent in my data. For
instance, Sabaaneh often cartoons a Palestinian as an olive tree, which is a dominant
Palestinian national symbol (PALESTINIAN AS OLIVE TREE). Similarly, male Egyptian car-
toonist Maher Badr frequently caricatures an Egyptian footballer as Egypt’s most
famous pharaoh, boy-king Tutankhamun (EGYPT”S FOOTBALLER AS KING TUTANKHA-
MUN). Certainly, the cultural context plays a role in the selection of the metaphor.
5.2.2. Differential memory
The memory of historical events, whether minor or major, can also influence the choice of
metaphors in political cartoons (for linguistic metaphor, see Deignan 2003; Kövecses
2005). The cultural belief system includes not only that of a person or the physical-cultural
environment, but also the religious beliefs entertained in a given culture (Kövecses 2015,
2020a). Consider a cartoon by Mexican artist Dario Castillejos posted on Facebook on 4
April 2021 (Figure 6a). The cartoon portrays the globe as a man carrying a cross-shaped
coronavirus particle, echoing the traditional scenes associated with the bleeding Christ
carrying his cross to the crucifixion or Calvary. The caption reads, “The path to the pan-
demic.”The metaphor may be construed as THE GLOBE AS JESUS, with THE VIRUS AS
THE CROSS and THE PANDEMIC AS THE VIA DOLOROSA. The source domain is thus pro-
vided by the religious belief system in the culture of the cartoonist by virtue of an analogy
between Jesus’s journey to the crucifixion and the world’s journey to the pandemic. This is
in tune with Kövecses (2020a) observation that the discourse of Christianity often gives
rise to metaphorical source domains in the Christian world. Similarly, the major events
that occurred in the past of Arab-Muslim society/culture (e.g. the stories of Moses,
Joseph, Abraha, and Solomon and his hoopoe) often influence the selection of metaphors
and metonymies by a Muslim cartoonist.
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 17
Key events in other cultures or countries may also affect the selection and use of meta-
phors in editorial cartoons. For example, Palestinian cartoonist Fadi Abou Hassan (Tomato
Cartoon, 21 October 2020) (Figure 6c), as well as male Iranian artist Iman Rezaee (Tomato
Cartoon, 14 March 2021), caricatures the Greek Titan or god Atlas supporting a corona-
virus-shaped globe on his shoulders (THE GLOBE AS CORONAVIRUS; THE VIRUS AS
BURDEN)—in Greek mythology, Atlas was forced to hold the sky up, after being defeated
by Zeus, to stop it falling on men’s heads. Some other cartoonists, including Doaa Elad
(Tomato Cartoon, 30 June 2020), substitute a doctor for Atlas (DOCTOR AS ATLAS), who
bears the coronavirus on his shoulders to stop it falling on patients (Figure 6e). Egyptian
cartoonist Sherif Arafa further depicts a working mother supporting the house and a
massive coronavirus on her shoulders (Figure 6f). In his controversial three-volume
Figure 6. Differential memory.
18 A. ABDEL-RAHEEM
book Black Athena, Martin Bernal (1987) places the origins of Greek statuary and temple-
building in Africa (in particular, Egypt) and the eastern Mediterranean. Conversely,
Ancient Greek literary and artistic forms have shaped the cultural unity of Europe, but
also of other continents.
Political cartoonists may also produce metaphors inspired by Rome’s culture. For
instance, the cartoon in Figure 6g, by male Turkish artist Halit Kurtulmus Aytoslu,
depicts the underground of the Colosseum, where gladiators (health workers carrying
“syringe-spears”and “house-shields”) are prepared for fights and uncaged wild beasts
(coronaviruses) make their grand entrance into the arena through main gates to entertain
a face masked public. The selection of the source domain may have also been triggered
by the Roman epic Gladiator (see § 5.2.3.1.).
In the same way, when America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold. Put differ-
ently, America’s economic, military, and cultural events shape our lives. In the context of
the pandemic, cartoonists such as Muhammad Sabaaneh and Carmelo Kalashnikov have
reimagined the 1945 Associated Press photograph of US Marines raising the American
flag on Iwo Jima, with a syringe substituted for the flag, and the soldiers replaced by
nurses, doctors and scientists. In Sabaaneh’s cartoon, published on 8 January 2021, Iwo
Jima is represented by a massive coronavirus particle, and blood is used instead of the
vaccine (Figure 6b). Kalashnikov’s cartoon was posted on Facebook on 27 December
2020. In either case, the iconic photo helps fuel patriotism (THE PANDEMIC AS WAR)
(for military metaphors, see Semino 2021). On the other hand, a cartoon by Alaa
Allagta (Tomato Cartoon, 9 April 2020) replaces the flag’s piece of cloth by a face mask
(Figure 5c). The caption says, “Face mask wars,”in reference to a news report about
German complaints about US tactics to source coronavirus protective gear (SECURING
PROTECTIVE EQUIPMENT AS WAR).
Being of specific public importance and due to many repetitions, some events (such as
the 9/11 attacks) remain accessible without a reminder cue, and their structure resembles
that of a mental model, featuring a spatiotemporal Setting, a Participant structure and
Actions (van Dijk 2014). This type of historical event knowledge, I argue, may also
influence the choice of a cartoonist’s metaphors. For example, the Amr Okasha cartoon
in Figure 6h depicts the coronavirus as a pilot who flies a New World Order plane. The
plane is crashing into the United Nations headquarters in New York. The metaphor
may be construed as COVID-19 AS TERRORIST. Similarly, the Menekse Cam cartoon in
Figure 6i shows a plane (a metonym for travel or tourism) crashing into a massive coro-
navirus particle. In either case, there are two frames invoked: one with the pandemic and
the other with the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center’s (WTC) twin towers in
New York City. There are a couple of key differences, however. In the Amr Okasha, there is
a generic space: The world changed after an event. It is also assumed that there are people
in the building, that the tower will fall, and that the image afterward will be hell. In the
Menekse Cam case, Covid-19 throws the travel and tourism industry into chaos. That is,
the lives of airline passengers are us, relatives, friends, neighbors, etc. The virus is thus
an obstacle that has blocked our progress. As noted by Johnson (1987), “[t]his experience
of blockage involves a pattern that is repeated over and over again throughout our lives”
(45). In both cases, the events of 9/11 may have influenced the choice of the metaphor
after all.
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 19
Finally, metaphorical creativity as defined in this paper is spatiotemporally variable. For
van Dijk (2014), “[w]e now know much more –and different things –as a community than
the “same”community a hundred years ago, specifically so in the field of technological
knowledge”(151). This technological knowledge, I would argue, can give rise to novel
metaphors (more precisely, metaphorical source domains). Consider a cartoon by Saad
al-Muhanadi originally posted on Facebook on 6 February 2021 (Figure 7a). The
cartoon depicts a new Covid strain as a software upgrade (NEW STRAIN OF THE VIRUS
AS UPGRADE). One’s sitting in front of one’s computer is a concrete, personal experience,
cognitively represented as subjective mental model, represented in one’s personal, auto-
biographical, episodic memory. Beyond perception or direct, empirical experience, dis-
course is also seen by van Dijk as a crucial source of human knowledge: people also
learn about the world through communication. It is claimed that such generic knowledge
is not merely developed by each individual, and based on personal experiences, but can
also be conveyed in numerous forms of pedagogical or public expository discourse for
kids and newcomers in the community (e.g. lessons, textbooks, and the mass media).
As always, there is also some kind of similarity on which the metaphor is based, but
what triggers or simply primes the use of the novel blend is a contextual factor (techno-
logical knowledge). In this sense, context-induced metaphors may be a subcategory of
resemblance metaphors (Kövecses 2015). The generic space (what the two concepts
have in common) is something like “an entity with versions”. The positive evaluation of
“upgrade”is not projected to the metaphorical blend.
Figure 7. Technological Knowledge.
20 A. ABDEL-RAHEEM
Similarly, a cartoon by Alaa Allagta depicts a coronavirus vaccine, metonymically rep-
resented by a syringe, as a loading program (Figure 7b) (VACCINE AS SOFTWARE
PROGRAM). Furthermore, a cartoon by female Algerian artist Siham Zebiri portrays the
virus as a laptop user formatting a hard disk (the earth) (Figure 7c). The caption reads:
“Coronavirus wants to erase the world.”Finally, on 16 April 2021, cartoonist Amin al-
Habaarah tweeted a cartoon that metaphorically blends the 1985 video game Super
Mario Bros with Covid-19 vaccination programs (Figure 7d). The cartoon highlights the
horrors faced by the coronavirus. The caption reads: “Take the coronavirus vaccine.”In
the blend, vaccinated people become the mustachioed plumber Mario. The cartoon
exploits the “universal language”of gaming, especially one of the gaming world’s most
famous characters, to convince vaccine-hesitant audiences. Finally, female Turkish cartoo-
nist Hilal Özcan also uses metaphors from the domain of GAMES (in particular, PlaySta-
tion) to understand the pandemic.
5.2.3. Popular culture
5.2.3.1. Cairo: the Hollywood of the Arab world. Popular culture—defined as the
general culture of a society or, more specifically, the forms of entertainment that
most people in a society enjoy, including movies, television series, commercials,
operas, songs, theatre plays, paintings, books, and so on—is a major source of motiv-
ation for the employment of many creative metaphors. In her article “Cairo: The Holly-
wood of the Arab world,”Dajani (1980) states that Egypt and Lebanon are the only
two Arab or Middle Eastern countries that consider cinema as an industry, a business,
and as entertainment. But it is the Egyptian cinema industry that has evolved as the
film center, or Hollywood, of the Arab world or the Middle East. According to
Dajani, there are several reasons for this. First, Egypt is the earliest film producer in
the region, and has been producing feature-length films regularly since 1930—
hence also the large number of well-trained and experienced Egyptian film artists.
Second, the country has the infrastructure, or studios, sound labs, equipment, and
technical capability to maintain the film industry. As both a source of hard-currency
income and a tool of propaganda, the cinema industry has further been well sup-
ported by the Egyptian government. Finally, because Egyptian films are produced in
Arabic, they have managed to compete with Western films and to become popular
throughout the Arab world. The same can be said of Egyptian music, television
series, commercials, and theatre plays.
Figure 8. The effect of Egypt’s popular culture on metaphor use.
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 21
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the metaphor sources triggered by Egypt’s popular
culture dominate the Egyptian sample (especially the works of Doaa Eladl, Amr Fahmy,
and Ghada Musfata, among others), but are almost absent from the non-Egyptian
samples. This seems to fit Kövecses (2015) understanding of differential concerns and inter-
ests, characterizing not only groups and individuals but also an entire society. For
instance, the cartoon in Figure 8a, by male Egyptian cartoonist Amr Fahmy (Al-Akhbar,
31 March 2020), depicts a scene from an Egyptian film called al-huruub “fleeing”(Atef
El-Tayeb 1991), with coronavirus particles instead of the bad guys. The film tells the
story of a fugitive, Montaser Abdel-Ghafuur (played by the late Egyptian actor Ahmed
Zaki), fleeing from three villains (Medhat, Ragawaat, and Farid). The caption reads:
“Inspired by Ahmed Zaki’sfilms—on anniversary of his death.”The word “Fleeing”is
written in red, and the phrase “Stay at home”in black. At work in this cartoon is the meta-
phor PEOPLE AT RISK OF CONTRACTING CORONAVIRUS AS FUGITIVES, with CORONA-
VIRUS PARTICLES AS THE BAD GUYS. Similarly, the Fahmy cartoon in Figure 8b features
an alien labeled “Corona”listening to Muhammad Abdel-Wahab’s song “I have come,
but I have no idea where I have come from.”In the cartoon, the coronavirus, located
between then-US President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, is
depicted as saying, “It turned out that I was born outside of wedlock. Everyone is reluctant
to admit their affair and acknowledge me.”The caption reads: “China and the United
States exchange accusations about the origins of the virus.”At place in this cartoon is
the metaphor CORONAVIRUS AS ILLEGITIMATE SON. Finally, the cartoon displayed in
Figure 8c, by female Egyptian artist Doaa Eladl (Tomato Cartoon, 5 June 2020), further
depicts a scene from a play called illa xams-ah “[it’s] five to …” (Adel Khairi 1963), with
Adel (played by Adel Khairi) represented by the coronavirus. In the cartoon, Shamardar
(played by Mary Munib) asks the coronavirus about the vacancy he is going to fill.
“Virus, ma’am. VIRUS”, the coronavirus replies. In the play, the question and answer are
repeated for humorous purposes (for repetition as a feature of comedy, see Attardo
2001). The caption, however, reads: “Raising awareness.”Repetition of “virus”in boldface
also then serves an emphasizing function. The underlying conceptual metaphor may be
construed as ESTABLISHING INFECTIONS AS FULL-TIME JOB. The implication is that the
virus is committed to his job of infecting and killing people. Thus, people should take
the virus seriously and stay home.
5.2.3.2. Western popular culture. Hollywood blockbusters (such as Titanic,King Kong,
The Incredible Hulk,Snow White,The Sword in the Stone, etc.) and masterpieces of
Western paintings (including drawings by Botticelli, Picasso, Michelangelo, Edvard
Munch, and Leonardo da Vinci), as well as traditional public entertainments (such as
bullfighting in Spain), also help (trigger, prompt, etc.) cartoonists choose a source
domain. For example, a cartoon by Mexican cartoonist Antonio Rodríguez, features a
coronavirus particle at the pinnacle of the Empire State Building in New York,
evoking the climax of the 1933 film King Kong (THE CORONAVIRUS AS GIANT
GORILLA IN KING KONG) (Figure 9a). The fighter planes attacking Kong are replaced
by syringes (a metonym for coronavirus vaccines) (COVID VACCINES AS FIGHTER
JETS). The Empire State Building is marked with the world’s map (THE GLOBE AS
THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING). The characterization of coronavirus as the GIANT
GORILLA in King Kong also occurs in cartoons by, among others, male Lebanese
22 A. ABDEL-RAHEEM
artist Habib Hadad (Tomato Cartoon, 28 March 2020) and female Moroccan cartoonist
Riham El Hour (Tomato Cartoon, 24 September 2020). What distinguishes them from
one another is the amount of detail each artist puts into their cartoons, but also by
the partial or selective projection from the different domains and the integration of
this information in the blend, which is controlled by pragmatic context models (their
social dimensions such as the settings, the identities of the participants, and their
goals) subjectively representing the communicative situation. For instance, Hadad’s
and Rodríguez”cartoons are cases of hybrid metaphors, where two elements (e.g.
the VIRUS and the GIANT GORILLA, or the GLOBE and the EMPIRE STATE BUILDING,
or the SYRINGES and the FIGHTER PLANES) are fused into one overall figure (Figure
9a and c respectively), whereas el Hour’s cartoon appears to be a case of verbo-pictor-
ial metaphors, where language (“Covid-19,”“confirmed coronavirus cases,”etc.) is
required for metaphorical meaning to emerge (although there are two coronavirus
Figure 9. Western Popular Culture.
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 23
particles around King Kong’s body). Furthermore, in the latter blend (but not the other
blends), the fighter planes (from the King Kong input) is not projected. Furthermore,
King Kong, with people in its left hand and coffins in its right, stands on top of a bill-
board instead of the Empire State Building (Figure 9b). The green billboard displays
“105346 confirmed cases”, as the Moroccan Covid-19 death toll climbs above 2227.
El Hour’s cartoon focuses on Morocco’s devastating coronavirus crisis or shocking
levels of infection, while the other cartoons focus on the world’sfight against Covid-
19. In Hadad’s cartoon, King Kong is attacked by seven planes on the Empire State
Building, while in Rodríguez”cartoon it is attacked by only three. In all such cases,
however, Western dominance of the cinema influences the choice of the metaphor
(compare this effect with Americanization).
Similarly, consider Figure 9d, where Maher Rashwaan cartoons someone handing
another a face mask. The cartoon is captioned “Italy.”The cartoon is an allusion to the por-
trayal of God and Adam’s hands about to touch in a detail from the Creation of Adam by
Italian artist Michelangelo (ITALY AS ADAM and SUPPLIER OF MASKS AS GOD). The cartoo-
nist presupposes vast amounts of knowledge (e.g. about Michelangelo’s masterpiece, the
coronavirus, the call by Italy for extra supplies of protective medical equipment, including
masks, and so on) among the reader-viewers. A similar cartoon by Antonio Rodríguez
replaces Adam and God by a Covid vaccine buyer and seller respectively (VACCINE
BUYER AS ADAM and VACCINE SELLER AS GOD) (Figure 9e). Unlike in Rodríguez”
cartoon, the choice of Michelangelo’s masterpiece (the source domain) in Rashwaan’s
cartoon is influenced both by Western art (compare this influence with cultural colonial-
ism, cultural imperialism, or westernization) and the topic or entity talked about (Italy).
Finally, consider Figure 9f, where Moroccan cartoonist Jalal Hajir depicts Adam wearing
a surgical face mask and spraying God’s hand with disinfectant or sanitizer to kill any
harmful organisms (in particular, Covid-19). The cartoon highlights the risks associated
with physical contact in the time of coronavirus.
Finally, male Turkish artist Mikail ÇİFTÇİcartoons Covid-19 as the Hulk (Figure 9g),
deriving from Marvel Comics”chemically mutated superhero Bruce Banner, who
turns into a 20 ft unjolly green monster when angry (COVID-19 AS THE HULK). Note
that the coronavirus, like the Hulk, is green. The mapped connotations are “destroying
buildings,”“killing people,”and so on. Siham Zebiri further compares Covid infections
to the poisoned apple offered to Snow White by the hooded witch (Figure 9h) (THE
CORONAVIRUS AS THE WICKED QUEEN). One implication is that the heroine (a poten-
tial victim) is tempted to open the door and bite into the red part of the apple and is
poisoned (infected). The viewer is thus urged to stay at home as much as possible. On
the other hand, German cartoonist Paolo Calleri caricatures a health worker pulling a
sword from a stone, in an echo of the Arthurian legend of the sword (Excalibur) in
the stone (Figure 9i). In the blend, the healthcare professional is the future King
Arthur, heralding his glory. King Arthur’s legend has spawned a great many films
and animations—Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, written
between 1135 and 1139, brought Arthur European fame and he and his knights
have been with us ever since. As in the previous cases, the metaphor derives from
the cultural setting.
24 A. ABDEL-RAHEEM
5.3. Social context
Citing one of his students, Kövecses (2015) claims that Hungary’s1,100yearsofconflict
prompt Hungarians to conceptualize life primarily as STRUGGLE and COMPROMISE. The
overall dominance of cultural history has, however, been questioned by Benczes and
Ságvári (2018), who suggest that age and type of school, among other social factors, do
have an impact on Hungarian teenagers”metaphorical conceptualizations of life. A compel-
ling case in point is also the relative absence of military metaphors in the German public dis-
course around the coronavirus pandemic (Jaworska 2021), albeit the country has seen two
world wars, the ignominy of division, etc. To complicate matters, wartime language has
been invoked by France, Italy, China, etc. (all countries that have experienced war) since
the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. It has also been abounded by those who have experi-
enced war and are still suffering, including Iraq, Libya, Palestine, and so on. One may
suppose that Germans do not like using war metaphors because war is associated with
shame and defeat, while English people like war metaphors because for them it is all
about victory and glory. We can thus also distinguish nineteenth-century Germany, which
was in ruins morally and economically, and today’s Germany, which is teaching others a
moral lesson. However, the matter is further complicated by the finding of strong variation
in the frequency, distribution, and argumentative use of conflict and violence metaphors
in political cartoons. Their frequency in the Calleri and Hachfeld samples is about 27.7 per
cent, whereas in the Kühn and Bengen samples their occurrence percentage is almost zero
per cent. The Calleri sample has 19 occurrences out of 73 images. In such Calleri cartoons,
a home is compared to a fortified medieval castle (attacked by spear-carrying coronavirus
particles), a syringe is cartooned as a weapon (a handgun, RPG, etc.), a coronavirus particle
is portrayed as a cowboy or rodeo rider, a healthcare professional in a hazmat suit is depicted
as King Arthur, and so on. In the current pandemic, it is thus interesting how military meta-
phors are employed, and by whom (see also Seixas 2021). Guardian columnist Marina Hyde
hypothesizes that women in public life do it rather less. As noted by Taylor and Hardman
(2004), “[s]uch research is badly needed to support the delinking of violence, gender and
language”(8). Following Kövecses (2020a), gender can also be thought of as both a cultural
and social issue, and so the distinctions made here just serve heuristic purposes.
The immediate social setting—involving social dimensions of life that usually revolve
around concepts like gender, class, work, education, and so on (Kövecses 2020a, 96)—can
of course play a crucial role in metaphorical conceptualization (Kolodny 1975,[1984]
2005). Although Charteris-Black (2012) found no variation between men and women
talking about depression in the types of metaphors (with both genders employing
“descent,”“weight and pressure”and “darkness and light”metaphors), he found striking
gender differences in how these metaphors were used (with women tending to employ
more metaphor mixing and clustering than men, thus being more emotionally expres-
sive). Similarly, in their comparative study of Silvio Berlusconi’s and Emma Bonino’s use
of metaphoric language, Semino and Koller (2009) reported that the female politician,
like her male counterpart, used metaphors drawn from SPORTS and WAR, but, unlike
the male politician, tended to exploit such base [vehicle] domains unconventionally, “in
order to […] challenge dominant views [and] as a concession to dominant, male-
centred political discourse”(56). The small size of the corpora analyzed in this study, as
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 25
well as the age gap between Bonino and Berlusconi, nevertheless raises questions around
their representativeness and the validity of the comparison.
On the basis of previous work, however, one plausible starting point is perhaps to
hypothesize that female Arab cartoonists make more frequent use of metaphors drawn
from a swath of traditionally feminine activities (such as cooking and cleaning) than their
male counterparts. This is generally linked to the notion that “metaphors tend to be
drawn from fields with which speakers have more experience or which they find more inter-
esting”(van Dijk 2008, 192). Nevertheless, “women are not a homogeneous group, they do
not always and everywhere behave in similar ways and their behaviour cannot be explained
in global, undifferentiated terms”(Cameron and Coates 1988, 23; for men and emotion talk,
see also Charteris-Black and Seale 2009). Indeed, individual differences among women
cannot be denied. Therefore, it is of interest to look at some preliminary but suggestive evi-
dence drawn from informal analysis of 800 political cartoons outside the context of coro-
navirus. Although CLEANING and KITCHEN metaphors were found to be used by almost
all female cartoonists analyzed, accounting for 12 percent of all the metaphors identified,
they were used statistically more frequently by Palestinian artists Omayya Joha, accounting
for 31 percent of all her metaphors. On the other hand, DINING and SERVING-OF-FOOD
metaphors were used primarily by Egyptian cartoonist Doaa Eladl, comprising 19
percent of all her metaphors. Similarly, female Egyptian cartoonist Nora Tharwat Makram
appears to have a preference for spinning and ironing metaphors. The virtue of patience
and skills of spinning and weaving are traditionally associated with women.
In the context of the current pandemic, the first stage was to identify metaphors that
had been observed by previous researchers in language and gender: WAR and SPORTS.
There was, however, one danger from treating source domains separately: it might over-
look other ways of categorization (Charteris-Black 2012). Conflict (from a row to nuclear
war) and contest (from chess to marathon) are a case in point. Still, it might seem accep-
table to stick to the original verbalizations.
26 A. ABDEL-RAHEEM
5.4. Knowledge about major entities of the discourse
A further factor that plays a role in producing differential metaphors includes knowledge
about the main entities participating in discourse, such as the speaker/writer/artist (con-
ceptualizer), the recipient (conceptualizer), and the entity or process described (topic).
Particularly creative instances can be found in political cartooning. German artist Guido
Kühn often caricatures former US President Donald Trump playing golf and hitting the
ball (the coronavirus). The CORONAVIRUS AS THE BALL metaphor was chosen as a
result of what Kühn knows about Trump (the president’s passion for golf). Testing positive
for coronavirus, Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah has also been caricatured receiving the virus-
ball with his right knee (Figure 10a). In another cartoon, the virus has been depicted as a
ball kicked in Salah“s face (Figure 10b). In either case, the metaphor must be construed as
CORONAVIRUS AS BALL. Obviously, the metaphor was selected and elaborated as a result
of what the cartoonists know about the topic, Salah (a footballer). Again, the central role
of context models in the choice of situationally relevant variations of discourse must be
emphasized. Figure 10a stresses Salah’s sublime skill, and Figure 10b the amount of
pain he is experiencing.
Particularly interesting is the role played by “cultural stereotyping”(that is, information
forced into standardized molds) (Said 1978) in creative blends. This is in tune with Veale’s
(2012) claim that stereotypes, albeit prejudicial and small-minded, play a fundamental
role in linguistic creativity. Consider the cartoons shown in Figure 11, where the icon of
the virus is superimposed onto cultural icons of India (e.g. a bindi, turban, snake
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 27
charmer, and eight-armed Maa Durga, the Hindu goddess of circus skills). In Figure 11a,
India, metonymically represented by “bindi”(by the woman with the bindi), is trying to
grapple with the virus and this takes its emotional toll. In Figure 11b, there is an entertai-
ner who appears to make a coronavirus-shaped snake move by playing music. The coro-
navirus-snake charmer causes the snake to rise out of a basket but not drop back in again.
Surprisingly, he cannot control the behavior of the coronavirus-snake. The coronavirus-
snake is wrapping itself around its charmer, who is treated with a mechanical breathing
device. Cartoonists such as Musa Keklik and Abdullah Derkaoui use the same metaphori-
cal blend, replacing the snake charmer’sflute or musical instrument by a syringe. In con-
trast, Figure 11c features the Hindu goddess Durga wearing a face mask and holding 8
syringes of Covid-19 vaccines. In the blend, Durga is fighting the coronavirus demon,
or the Coronasura. The caption reads: “India (and all of us) waiting for invincibility […].
Right now India has literally no arms enough to take care of all its people.”In Figure
11d, on the other hand, a coronavirus particle and an Indian sporting a turban are
fused into one overall figure. A male scientist using a microscope in a laboratory says,
“It’s clearly the Indian variant.”In May 2021, India was added to the UK’s“red list”for
travel as it battled a devastating rise in infections and new Covid variants that have
spread to other countries, including the UK. This is again a case of conceptual blending,
or binding, as proposed by Fauconnier and Turner (2002). Note that metaphor is a bypro-
duct of blending. In any case, creative blending (whether metaphorical or not) is affected
by context.
Interestingly, a 2021 cartoon by Tjeerd Royaards also features a large number of com-
muters riding on the roofs of a train labeled “Healthcare India”, which goes into a coro-
navirus tunnel. PURPOSIVE ACTIVITY IS SELF-PROPELLED MOVEMENT TOWARD A
DESTINATION is a deeply embedded metaphor in human thinking (e.g. Forceville 2006).
Indeed, English has conventional metaphorical expressions such as “We are going
through a long dark tunnel and no one can see the light.”That is, the cartoon may be
based on a completely conventional conceptual metaphor. However, the widely-shared
stereotype of the Indian commuter riding on the roof of an overcrowded train triggers
the extension of that existing conventional conceptual metaphor and causes the cartoo-
nist to select a metaphorical depiction that best fits that situation.
Figure 10. Knowledge About MAIN Elements.
28 A. ABDEL-RAHEEM
Consider also a cartoon tweeted by German illustrator Paolo Calleri on 8 March 2020.
The cartoon depicts Michelangelo’s 500-year-old David statue (an embodiment of perfec-
tion) wearing a surgical face mask and a pair of mask-shaped underpants and holding
hygiene products (Figure 12a). In this context, David is a metonym for Italy. As noted pre-
viously, Western popular culture (e.g. Michelangelo’s drawings) may influence metapho-
rical conceptualization. In the present example, however, it is also the cartoonist’s
knowledge about Italy, the main topic of the discourse, that gives rise to the blend. On
23 February 2020, Calleri also cartooned Italy as a coronavirus-shaped pizza (Figure
12b). The pizza chef is wearing an Italian flag as a toque. The halo-droplets of sweat
can be seen as emotion runes. In this metaphor, Italy is mapped onto the pizza, and
the Italian government onto the stressed-out pizza chef. The cartoon is captioned “Coro-
navirus in Italien”. Bergamo, the Italian province of 1.2 million people, was put into lock-
down with the rest of the Lombardy region on 8th of March, during which time it quickly
became the “ground zero”of the epidemic in Italy. In this case, the metaphor is motivated
by the artist’s knowledge about Italy’s competitive pizza market. Future research may
more systematically explore cultural icons and coronavirus.
Finally, a special case of the knowledge that people have of themselves is differential
personal concerns and interests (Kövecses 2015). One’s intense professional interest may
affect one’s choice of metaphor in discourse. For instance, the late Egyptian thinker and
writer Mostafa Mahmoud has frequently used metaphors drawn from medicine because
he was a physician before becoming a writer. Similarly, many of the visual elements
used by Alaa Allagta, a physician-cartoonist, reflect his professional interest: the lungs,
Figure 11. Creative blending and cultural stereotyping.
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 29
deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the stethoscope, and the electrocardiogram are entities that
reveal medicine as a source domain in his cartoons. Consider also a cartoon by female
Egyptian artist Doaa Eladl originally published in 2020. The cartoon depicts a face mask
(a metonym for the coronavirus pandemic) as a colorful painting (Figure 13). The
caption says, “The nightmare will end soon.”In this case, the novel, creative blend
comes about as a result of what the cartoonist knows about herself. As pointed out by
Kövecses (2015), “[d]octors, teachers, athletes, scientists, and so on often take their
source domains from their fields of activity to characterize and reason about the various
target domains they encounter, talk, and think about”(107). Commenting on his frequent
use of animal metaphors, American illustrator Chad Crowe (personal communication,
October 2018) further says, “I do enjoy drawing animals, so if one works, my mind tends
to go there. I do think the unconscious plays a huge role, as all artists have different back-
grounds and tend to have certain fetishes for what they enjoy drawing.”
Figure 12. Metaphorical conceptualization and Italy as the main topic of the discourse.
Figure 13. Tomato Cartoon, 26 May 2020. Cartoon by Doaa Eladl.
30 A. ABDEL-RAHEEM
5.5. Physical resemblance
Although configurational or physiognomic similarity (materiality, included) is by no
means an indispensable condition for metaphors, it plays a fundamental role in the selec-
tion of novel metaphors (Feinstein 1982; Forceville 1996; Kogan et al. 1980; Marks 1996). In
the context of the coronavirus crisis, the virus adorned with an outer layer of protein
covered in spikes, like a crown, has been conceptualized as a football, as a volleyball,
as a bowling ball (with the economy, the globe or patients as a group of pins) (e.g.
Figure 14a), as a ping pong or table tennis ball, or as a cow’s well-filled udder. Similarly,
a syringe (a metonym for a Covid vaccine) has been cartooned as a pen, as a plane, as a
pistol, as a lit candle, as a rifle, as a cannon, as a fish-hook, as a rocket, as a rocket-pro-
pelled grenade (RPG), as a sewing needle, as a Formula One racing car, as the central
rod of an umbrella (with the virus as drops of rain), or as an arrow aimed at a green
round fruit (=the virus) above the world’s head. That is, such images make one think of
affordances: the vaccine (the syringe) shape “affords”, i.e. easily evokes images of
weapons, (rockets, etc.), while the round prickly shape of the virus evokes other
weapons. Furthermore, a fabric face mask has been portrayed as a tent, as the circular
canopy of an umbrella, as a parachute, as the sail of a boat, or as the elastic band of a
catapult.
But of course physical resemblance as a factor may combine with the cultural context
and the two can, in this way, powerfully influence the cartoonist’s choice of metaphor, as
in Figure 14b, where BULLFIGHTING is viewed by supporters as a fundamental part of
Spanish culture and there is physical similarity between a syringe and a sword and
between a face mask and a muleta (CORONAVIRUS AS BULL; THE GLOBE AS MATADOR;
MASK AS MULETA; SYRINGE AS SWORD/BANDERILLA). The pandemic is metonymically
represented by the syringe, the face mask, the coronavirus spike protein. The CORONA-
VIRUS PANDEMIC AS BULLFIGHT metaphor is a specific version of the generic-level meta-
phor ILLNESS/LIFE/POLITICS AS BULLFIGHT. It can also be found in cartoons by, among
others, Amr Fahmy, Naji Benaji and Siham Zebiri. The metaphor may be motivated by
physical resemblance. But the use of the metaphor by someone who has never seen a
matador, or a bull killed on the field of honor, may be surprising. The cartoonist is appar-
ently indebted to books, pamphlets, magazines, television series, or movies dealing with
or touching upon that long-standing Spanish tradition. He, albeit not an authority on
bullfighting, knows that cruel sport well.
Figure 14. Physical Similarity.
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 31
Mental models as van Dijk has conceptualized them are first of all multimodal rep-
resentations of everyday experiences that control all our perceptions and interactions
and hence our personal stories about them. Secondly, we construe mental models to
understand the stories or news reports (including images) of the events and experiences
we read in the media, television, movies, etc., about which we also tell others, a crucial
part of popular reproduction of stories, including rumors and fake news. In this way,
we also learn about other countries and cultures, but we adapt them to our own socio-
cultural knowledge, so that our mental models of events in other cultures are different
from those in other cultures. Studying the role of knowledge schemas in culture, Bartlett
(1932) demonstrates that understanding a North American indigenous story (“The War of
Ghosts”) requires relevant indigenous knowledge. This fundamental result can be
accounted for in terms of context models: participants activate their own knowledge
system so as to understand a text (van Dijk 2014). Sociocultural knowledge (also of
other cultures) is generic and shared, and hence not the same as mental models. We
only use this knowledge to create mental models, also when we tell about other cultures,
or make a cartoon, or write a news report about events in other cultures. Unique personal
models must thus not be confused with generic scripts, frames, etc. For reasons of space,
it is not possible to probe further here.
5.6. Language
Another source of visual metaphorical creativity is language, including idioms and pro-
verbs such as “be in sb’s DNA/be part of sb’s DNA”,“light at the end of the tunnel”,
“sweep sth under the rug,”“pull the rug from under sb’s feet,”“throw a chair at the
tubular lantern (originally used when the police swamp crime hotspots),”and so on.
For example, consider a cartoony by Egyptian male cartoonist Hany Tolba originally
posted on Facebook on 28 November 2020. The cartoon shows a female health pro-
fessional sweeping coronavirus particles under the carpet. The caption reads: “Fighting
the pandemic.”The import of the cartoon is that the government hides the pandemic
or tries to keep it secret instead of dealing with it. The blend is motivated both by the
common idiom “sweep sth under the carpet”and larger cultural context. The idiomatic
expression is based on the idea of a lazy maid or housewife sweeping dust, dirt, etc.
under a rug or carpet, instead of going to the trouble of grabbing a dustpan, sweeping
them in, and depositing them in the trash. It came into use in the early 1900s.
Similarly, arist Maher Rashwaan cartoons the world as a man going through a long
dark coronavirus tunnel and no one can see the light (THE CORONAVIRUS AS LONG
DARK TUNNEL) (Figure 15a). Correspondingly, the oceanic metaphors for the coronavirus
crisis (waves, surges) also give rise to nonlinguistic instantiations. Examples of the
oceanic metaphors for the pandemic can be found in my corpus, in cartoons by
Omayya Joha, Naji Benaji, Tjeerd Royaards, Dario Castillejos, Amjad Rasmi, Paolo
Calleri, Hasan Balibal, and Tariq Negm, among others. Their precise forms and commu-
nicative functions diverge significantly, however. For instance, in some cartoons, the two
entities (water and coronavirus) are blended together in the form of fusion or superim-
position, and the amount of detail is greater than in others. In the cartoon by Dario Cas-
tillejos, originally published on 12 January 2021, there is a male doctor building a
syringe-shaped sandcastle on the beach as a large coronavirus wave approaches the
32 A. ABDEL-RAHEEM
shore (Figure 15b). Similarly, the cartoon by Tjeerd Royaards, published on 19 March
2021, shows the globe standing on a hill of skulls (a metonym for death or coronavirus
victims), making a raft (roughly tying syringes together) and swamped by a massive
Covid wave. Furthermore, the cartoon by Amjad Rasmi, published on 19 September
2020, depicts the globe wearing a face mask (a metonym for the pandemic) and
riding waves. After all, note that “visual metaphors […] never express exactly the
same meanings as their verbal counterparts, even if the underlying thought patterns
are similar”(El Refaie 2014, 152).
Many cartoons also “literalize”conventional metaphorical expressions via concrete and
more specific visual images. This may be termed “literalization of metaphors”(Goatly
2012). Male Egyptian cartoonist Farag Hassan tends to use this strategy much more fre-
quently than all the other cartoonists in my data (https://www.facebook.com/farag.
hassan.961). Furthermore, numerous visual metaphors are plays on words. In addition,
grammatical gender—a small quirk of grammar—can be used to predict personified
gender in art (Abdel-Raheem and Goubaa 2021; Segel and Boroditsky 2011). In the
context of coronavirus, “corona”is feminine in Arabic, and therefore it is more likely to
be personified as female. Consider Figure 15c, where two different concrete objects (a
Figure 15. Language.
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 33
coronavirus particle and a young woman) are blended together in the form of superim-
position (“hybrid metaphor”). The young woman, named “Kuuki virus,”says, “The problem
is that I”m an extrovert and have some charisma, Osama …But I have been bullied at by
Egyptians, who have made fun of me. Isn”t enough that they smell of chlorine?! Similarly,
“face masks”and “hand sanitizers”, consisting of a suffix(-aat) attached to the singular
stem of the noun, are feminine in Arabic, and hence are personified as female (belly
dancers) in Figure 15d. But grammatical gender as a factor here also combines with
culture. After all, “coronavirus”can generally be of either gender, where “virus”is mascu-
line, and “corona”feminine.
6. General discussion
If context-induced metaphor (or contextualist theory of metaphor) is to be a research
enterprise, which one takes to mean an enterprise that enhances creativity, human under-
standing, and knowledge, then it must move on from informal, suggestive and word- or
sentence-level analyses towards a discourse-level discipline that relies on broad empirical
evidence, on experimentally based or corpus-linguistic methods (see also
Ahrens and Jiang 2020). Quantitative metaphor analysis and coding of metaphor by
itself, all too typical in metaphor studies, does not show how metaphors arise in social
situations and how exactly social actors use them. It gives a very general picture of the
frequency of occurrence, but glosses over the more detailed discursive and cognitive pro-
cesses involved in metaphor variation. A much more detailed theoretical framework,
including different cognitive terms (e.g. event models, context models, sociopolitical
knowledge, ideologies, etc.) is thus required.
I have examined in the previous section the influence of various types of context—
including topical news, the cultural situation, etc. (in no order of importance) —on the
creation of Covid metaphors. As pointed out earlier, these contexts are cognitively
mediated through participants”memories and knowledge. The findings for the frequency
of such contextual factors in my corpus are summarized in the schematic diagram below
(Figure 16).
Particularly interesting is the finding of discourse as the major source of human
knowledge beyond observation and experience. Importantly, it is useful to distinguish
between direct and indirect sources of metaphor, where multimodal personal experi-
ences are classified as direct, and communication (reading novels and newspapers,
watching movies, etc.) as indirect. More simply, we learn about the world through dis-
course (by the media) and therefore choose metaphors that are not motivated by direct,
empirical experience. The use of bullfighting metaphors by non-Spaniards is again a
case in point. Unfortunately, although there are thousands of books and articles on
knowledge, so little is said on the discursive sources of knowledge, also about other
cultures.
Within our cognitive psychological framework, metaphors are thus also expressions of
knowledge, and the interface between metaphor and knowledge is context-dependent
(van Dijk 2014). It is not society or social structure itself that influences metaphor use,
but metaphor users”(or social members”) mental interpretation or construction of
these social structures and social situations, namely as context models. One of the impor-
tant schematic categories of mental models is Knowledge.
34 A. ABDEL-RAHEEM
7. Conclusion and future directions
My main concern in this paper was with where political cartoonists recruit novel and crea-
tive conceptual materials from when they draw and think metaphorically and why. These
and many other questions about multimodal creativity were not answered in the cogni-
tive linguistic literature.It was suggested that political cartoonists recruit new and uncon-
ventional conceptual materials for metaphorical purposes not just from embodied
experience but also from various contexts, including language, topical news, the social
situation, the cultural situation, etc. (in no order of importance). After all, for the sake
of simplicity and for a more cognitively embedded theory of context, I suggested that
one might also use the concept of multimodal “context models”as a cover term for all
such crucial parameters that at each moment are relevant for conceptualizers and/or
readers.
Genre scholars, multimodal creativity researchers, and cognitivists in various disciplines
should find this article pertinent to their concerns. Consider when watching, especially,
BBC news reports where a journalist or political editor talks to camera: When they say
something like “The wheels of government are turning slowly on this, that or the
other,”the camera pans out to some wheel on a car somewhere, or when they say,
“We are living in dark times,”it pans to a very shadowy part of Westminster (see
Graham 2021). One important avenue for future research is thus to investigate the
BBC’s use of visual metaphors.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Brigitte Nerlich, Paul Barrett, Jonathan Charteris-Black, Teun van Dijk, and two
anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. But it remains
the privilege of the author to be solely responsible for all mistakes and controversial opinions. I am
Figure 16. Frequency of sources of metaphorical creativity in political cartoons.
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 35
also grateful to the copyright holders who have granted permission to reprint their cartoons in this
paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Funding
This work was funded by the University of Bremen [Grant Number: CRDF-Positions No. 23 and 24].
References
Abdel-Raheem, Ahmed. 2020.“Mental Model Theory as a Model for Analysing Visual and
Multimodal Discourse.”Journal of Pragmatics 155: 303–320.
Abdel-Raheem, Ahmed. 2021a.“Frame Flouting and Creative Multimodal Impoliteness.”Manuscript
Submitted for Publication.
Abdel-Raheem, Ahmed. 2021b.“‘Stay at Home’: Speech Acts in Arab Political Cartoons on Covid-19
Pandemic.”Manuscript Submitted for Publication.
Abdel-Raheem, Ahmed. 2021c.“Reality Bites: How the Pandemic Has Begun to Shape the Way We,
Metaphorically, See the World.”Discourse and Society 32 (5). doi:10.1177/09579265211013118.
Abdel-Raheem, Ahmed, and Mona Goubaa. 2021.“Language and Cultural Cognition: The Case of
Grammatical Gender in Arabic and Personified Gender in Cartoons.”Review of Cognitive
Linguistics 19 (1): 111–141.
Ahrens, Kathleen, and Menghan Jiang. 2020.“Source Domain Verification Using Corpus-based
Tools.”Metaphor & Symbol 35 (1): 43–55.
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y., Andrea Hollington, Nico Nassenstein, and Anne Storch, eds. 2019.
“Creativity in Language.”International Journal of Language and Culture 6 (1): 1–223 [Special Issue].
Ashton, Elizabeth. 1994.“Metaphor in Context: An Examination of the Significance of Metaphor for
Reflection and Communication.”Educational Studies 23 (3): 357–366.
Attardo, Salvatore. 2001.Humorous Texts: A Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Barsalou, Lawrence W. 1999.“Perceptual Symbol Systems.”Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22: 577–
660.
Bartlett, Frederic. 1932.Remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Benczes, Réka, and Bence Ságvári. 2018.“Where Metaphors Really Come from: Social Factors as
Contextual Influence in Hungarian Teenagers’Metaphorical Conceptualizations of Life.”
Cognitive Linguistics 29 (1): 121–154.
Bernal, Martin. 1987.Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. New Brunswick:
Rutgers University.
Black, Max. 1979.“More About Metaphor.”In Metaphor and Thought, edited by Andrew Ortony, 19–
43. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Boers, Frank. 1999.“When a Bodily Source Domain Becomes Prominent.”In Metaphor in Cognitive
Linguistics, edited by Raymond Gibbs and Gerard Steen, 47–56. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Bosch, Peter. 1984.Lexical Learning, Context Dependence, and Metaphor. Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Linguistics Club.
Brandt, Per Aage. 2004.Spaces, Domains and Meaning: Essays in Cognitive Semiotics. European
Semiotics Series No. 4. Bern: Peter Lang.
Caballero, Rosario. 2009.“Cutting Across the Senses: Imagery in Winespeak and Audiovisual
Promotion.”In Multimodal Metaphor, edited by Charles Forceville and Eduardo Urios-Aparisi,
73–94. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
36 A. ABDEL-RAHEEM
Cameron, Deborah, and Jennifer Coates. 1988.“Some Problems in the Sociolinguistic Explanation of
Sex Differences.”In Women in Their Speech Communities, edited by Jennifer Coates and Deborah
Cameron, 13–26. New York: New York.
Cameron, Lynne, Robert Maslen, Zazie Todd, John Maule, Peter Stratton, and Neil Stanley. 2009.“The
Discourse Dynamics Approach to Metaphor and Metaphor-Led Discourse Analysis.”Metaphor
and Symbol 24 (2): 63–89.
Camp, Elisabeth. 2006.“Contextualism, Metaphor, and What is Said.”Mind and Language 21 (3):
280–309.
Carroll, Noel. 1994.“Visual Metaphor.”In Aspects of Metaphor, edited by J. Hintikka, 189–218.
Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Carroll, Noel. 1996.“A Note on Film Metaphor.”Journal of Pragmatics 26 (6): 809–822.
Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2012.“Shattering the Bell jar: Metaphor, Gender, and Depression.”
Metaphor and Symbol 27 (3): 199–216.
Charteris-Black, Jonathan, and Clive Seale. 2009.“Men and Emotion Talk: Evidence from the
Experience of Illness.”Gender and Language 3 (1): 81–113.
Christensen, Bo T., Linden J. Ball, and Rolf Reber. 2020.“Perceptual Fluency Effects in Judgments of
Creativity and Beauty: Creative Objects are Perceived Fluently Yet they are Visually Complex.”
Journal of Cognitive Psychology 32 (1): 45–66.
Cotter, Colleen. 2001.“Discourse and Media.”In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, edited by
Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen, and Heidi E. Hamilton, 416–436. Malden, MA/Oxford, UK:
Blackwell.
Dajani, Karen Finlon. 1980.“Cairo: the Hollywood of the Arab World.”Gazette 26: 89–98.
Deignan, Alice. 2003.“Metaphorical Expressions and Culture: An Indirect Link.”Metaphor and
Symbol 18 (4): 255–271.
Deignan, Alice, and Lynne Cameron. 2013.“A Re-examination of UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING.”
Journal of Cognitive Semiotics 5(1–2): 220–243.
Edwards, Derek, and Jonathan Potter. 1992.Discursive Psychology. London: Sage.
El Refaie, Elisabeth. 2009.“Multiliteracies: How Readers Interpret Political Cartoons.”Visual
Communication 8 (2): 181–205.
El Refaie, Elisabeth. 2014.“Looking on the Dark and Bright Side: Creative Metaphors of Depression in
two Graphic Memoirs.”Auto/Biography Studies 29 (1): 149–174.
El Refaie, Elisabeth. 2019.Visual Metaphor and Embodiment in Graphic Illness Narratives. Oxford:
Oxford University press.
El Refaie, Elisabeth, and Kathrin Hörschelmann. 2010.“Young People’s Readings of Apolitical
Cartoon and the Concept of Multimodal Literacy.”Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politicsof
Education 31 (2): 195–207.
Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. 2002.The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s
Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books.
Feinstein, Hermine. 1982.“Meaning and Visual Metaphor.”Studies in Art Education 223 (2): 45–55.
Forceville, Charles. 1996.Pictorial Metaphor in Advertising. London: Routledge.
Forceville, Charles. 2006.“The Source-Path-Goal Schema in the Autobiographical Journey
Documentary: McElwee, van der Keuken, Cole.”New Review of Film and Television Studies 4 (3):
241–261.
Forceville, Charles. 2020.Visual And Multimodal Communication. Applying the Relevance Principle.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Freeman, Margaret. 2017.“Multimodalities of Metaphor: A Perspective from the Poetic Arts.”Poetics
Today 38 (1): 61–92.
Gibbs, Raymond W. 2017.Metaphor Wars: Conceptual Metaphors in Human Life. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Gibbs, Raymond W., and Richard J. Gerrig. 1989.“How Context Makes Metaphor Comprehension
Seem ‘Special’.”Metaphor & Symbolic Activity 4 (3): 145–158.
Givón, T. 2005.Context as Other Minds: The Pragmatics of Sociality, Cognition and Communication.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 37
Gkiouzepas, Lampros, and Margaret K. Hogg. 2011.“Articulating a new Framework for Visual
Metaphors in Advertising.”Journal of Advertising 40 (1): 103–120.
Goatly, Andrew. 2012.Meaning and Humor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gombrich, Ernst H. 1971.The Cartoonist’s Armoury. In Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays
on the Theory of Art, Edited by Ernst H. Gombrich, 127-142, 2nd edn. London: Phaidon.
Grady, Joseph. 1999.“A Typology of Motivation for Conceptual Metaphors: Correlations vs.
Resemblance.”In Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics, edited by Ray W. Gibbs and Gerard J.
Steen, 79–100. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Graham, Alison. 2021, May. “Driven to Distraction.”Radio Times,22–48 (p. 45).
Greenall, Annjo Klungervik. 2001.“Towards a Socio-Cognitive Account of Flouting and Flout-Based
Meaning.”Unpublished doctoral thesis, Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
Henley, Jon, and Niamh McIntyre. 2020.“Survey Uncovers Widespread Belief in ‘Dangerous’Covid
Conspiracy Theories.”The Guardian, October 26. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/
26/survey-uncovers-widespread-belief-dangerous-covid-conspiracy-theories.
Hidalgo-Downing, Laura, and Blanca Kraljevic Mujic. 2011.“Multimodal Metonymy and Metaphor as
Complex Discourse Resources for Creativity in ICT Advertising Discourse.”Review of Cognitive
Linguistics 19 (1): 153–178.
Hidalgo-Downing, Laura, and Blanca Kraljevic Mujic, eds. 2020.Performing Metaphoric Creativity
across Modes and Contexts. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hoffmann, Thomas. 2020.“Construction Grammar and Creativity: Evolution, Psychology and
Cognitive Science.”Special Issue of Cognitive Semiotics 13 (1): 20202018. https://doi.org/10.
1515/cogsem-2020-2018.
Hofstadter, Douglas, and Liane Gabora. 1989.“Synopsis of a Workshop on Humor and Cognition.”
Humor 2 (4): 417–440.
Human Rights Watch. 2021, April. A threshold crossed: Israeli authorities and the crimes of apartheid
and persecution. https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/media_2021/04/israel_palestine0421_
web_0.pdf.
Hymes, D. 1974.“Ways of Speaking.”In Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking, edited by R.
Bauman and J. Sherzer, 433–451. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide. 2013.“The Relationship Between Conceptual Metaphor and Culture.”
Intercultural Pragmatics 10 (2): 315–339.
Jaworska, Sylvia. 2021.“Investigating Media Representations of the Coronavirus in the UK, USA and
Germany: What Can a Comparative Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis Contribute to Our
Understanding of the Covid-19 Pandemic?”In Viral Discourse, edited by Rodney H. Jones, 26–
37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Johnson, Mark. 1987.The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Kogan, Nathan, Kathleen Connor, Augusta Gross, and Donald Fava. 1980.“Understanding Visual
Metaphor: Developmental and Individual Differences.”Monographs of the Society for Research
in Child Development 45 (1): 85. doi:10.2307/1165832.
Kolodny, Annette. 1975.The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and
Letters. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Kolodny, Annette. [1984] 2005.The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers,
1630–1860. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Kövecses, Zoltán. 2005.Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Kövecses, Zoltán. 2010.“A new Look at Metaphorical Creativity in Cognitive Linguistics.”Cognitive
Linguistics 21 (4): 663–697.
Kövecses, Zoltán. 2015.Where Metaphors Come from: Reconsidering Context in Metaphor. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Kövecses, Zoltán. 2020a.Extended Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Kövecses, Zoltán. 2020b.“An Extended View of Conceptual Metaphor Theory.”Review of Cognitive
Linguistics 18 (1): 112–130.
38 A. ABDEL-RAHEEM
Kövecses, Zoltán, Laura Ambrus, Dániel Hegedűs, Ren Imai, and Anna Sobczak. 2019.“The Lexical vs.
the Corpus-Based Method in the Study of Metaphors.”In Metaphor and Metonymy in the Digital
Age: Theory and Methods for Building Repositories of Figurative Language, edited by Marianna
Bolognesi, Mario Brdar, and Kristina Š. Despot, 149–173. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kuczok, Marcin. 2016.“Precious Possession, War or Journey? Conceptual Metaphors for LIFE in
American English, Hungarian and Polish.”In Various Dimensions of Contrastive Studies, edited
by Bożena Cetnarowska, Marcin Kuczok, and Marcin Zabawa, 157–170. Katowice:
Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego. Accessed July 3, 2017. http://www.researchgate.net.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980.Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner. 1989.More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Lampert, Martin D., and Susan M. Ervin-Tripp. 1998.“Exploring Paradigms: The Study of Gender and
Sense of Humor Near the End of the 20th Century.”In The Sense of Humor: Explorations of a
Personality Characteristic, edited by Willibald Ruch, 231–270. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Littlemore, Jeannette. 2019.Metaphors in the Mind: Sources of Variation in Embodied Metaphor.
Cambridge: Cambridge University press.
Maalej, Zouhair. 2004.“Figurative Language in Anger Expressions in Tunisian Arabic: An Extended
View of Embodiment.”Metaphor & Symbol 19 (1): 51–76.
Marks, Lawrence E. 1996.“On Perceptual Metaphors.”Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 11 (1): 39–66.
McDougall, Siné, Irene Reppa, Jozef Kulik, and Alisdair Taylor. 2016.“What Makes Icons Appealing?
The Role of Processing Fluency in Predicting Icon Appeal in Different Task Contexts.”Applied
Ergonomics 55: 156–172.
McEnery, Tony, Richard Xiao, and Yukio Tono. 2006.Corpus-Based Language Studies. An Advanced
Resource Book (Routledge Applied Linguistics). London: Routledge.
Müller, Cornelia. 2008.Metaphors Dead and Alive, Sleeping and Walking: A Dynamic View. Chicago, IL:
The University of Chicago Press.
Mussolff, Andreas. 2001.“Political Imagery of Europe: A House Without Exit Doors?”Journal of
Multilingual and Multicultural Development 21 (3): 216–229.
Paolillo, John C. 1998.“Gary Larsen’s Far Side: Nonsense? Nonsense!”Humor: International Journal of
Humor Research 12 (1): 71–93.
Riad, Sally. 2018.“The Role of Visual Metonymy in Leadership Symbolism: Mapping Its Dynamics
Through the Sphinx.”Leadership 15 (4): 480–512. doi:10.1177/1742715018770929.
Said, Edward W. 1978.Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.
Schmidt, Goran, and Mario Brdar. 2012.“Variation in the Linguistic Expression of the Conceptual
Metaphor Life is a (Gambling) Game.”In Cognitive Linguistics Between Universality and
Variation, edited by Mario Brdar, Ida Raffaelli, and Milena Žic Fuchs, 271–292. Cambridge:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Segel, Edward, and Lera Boroditsky. 2011.“Grammar in Art.”Frontiers in Psychology 1: 244. doi:10.
3389/fpsyg.2010.00244.
Seixas, Eunice Castro. 2021.“War Metaphors in Political Communication on Covid-19.”Frontiers in
Sociology 5: 583680. doi:10.3389/fsoc.2020.583680.
Semino, Elena. 2008.Metaphor in Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Semino, Elena. 2021.““Not Soldiers but Fire-Fighters”–Metaphors and Covid-19.”Health
Communication 36 (1): 50–58.
Semino, Elena, and Koller Veronika. 2009.“Metaphor, Politics and Gender: A Case Study from Italy.”
In Politics, Gender and Conceptual Metaphors, edited by Kathleen Ahrens, 36–61. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Sharifian, Farzad. 2017.Advances in Cultural Linguistics. Singapore: Springer.
Shinjo, Makiko, and Jerome L. Myers. 1987.“The Role of Context in Metaphor Comprehension.”
Journal of Memory and Language 26 (2): 226–241.
Sontag, Susan. 1989.Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Doubleday.
Stefanowitsch, Anatol. 2020.Corpus Linguistics: A Guide to the Methodology. Berlin: Language
Science Press.
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 39
Stefanowitsch, Anatol, and Stefan Th. Gries, eds. 2006.Corpus-based Approaches to Metaphor and
Metonymy. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Stern, Josef. 2000.Metaphor in Context. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Taylor, Anita, and M. J. Hardman. 2004.“War, Language and Gender, What New Can Be Said?
Framing the Issues.”Women & Language 27 (2): 3–19.
van Dijk, Teun. 2008.Discourse and Context: A Sociocognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
van Dijk, Teun. 2014.Discourse and Knowledge: A Sociocognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
van Dijk, Teun. 2020.Critical Review of Framing Studies in Social Movement Research. Barcelona:
Center of Discourse Studies.
Veale, Tony. 2012.Exploding the Creativity Myth: The Computational Foundations of Linguistic
Creativity. London: Bloomsbury.
Veale, Tony, Kurt Feyaerts, and Charles Forceville. 2013.Creativity and the Agile Mind: A Multi-
Disciplinary Study of a Multi-Faceted Phenomenon. Berlin: Mouton de Gryuter.
Yahya, Sara. 2021.“Pictorial and Multimodal Metaphor in Political Cartoons During the French
Economic Crisis (2012-2018).”Doctoral thesis, Alexandria University.
Yu, Ning. 2009.From Body to Meaning in Culture. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
40 A. ABDEL-RAHEEM
