Hawks, beasts, and canaries: A comparative analysis of animal metaphors used to frame China during the COVID-19 pandemic

Although studies in the field of discourse analysis have revealed the
presence of animal and violent metaphors in Sino-phobic discourses
about China (Carrico, 2018; Lee, 2021), there are still no systematic
studies focusing on metaphor and Sinophobia. This study aims at
providing a further contribution to the studies of Sino-phobic discourses
by focusing specifically on animal metaphors used to frame China during
the COVID-19 pandemic in two corpora of American and Australian
newspapers. The analysis combines methodologies of corpus linguistics
and discourse analysis. First, a semantic domain analyses was carried out
with WMatrix 5 (Rayson, 2008), then, metaphors in the semantic field of
living creatures were identified and analysed adopting cognitive and
discursive approaches. The results showed how predatory and
threatening animals are often associated with Chinese institutions in the
newspapers analysed and this negative metaphorical representation is
juxtaposed to that of Australian institutions which are framed as
harmless pets.