“They are battling a different war”: A corpus-based comparative study on war metaphor in COVID-19 discourse in China and U.S.

The war metaphor, a dominant conceptual metaphor in illness discourse, has been widely employed in COVID-19 news reports in both China and the United States. However, existing scholarship often treats the war metaphor as a monolithic concept, with limited attention to how cultural and contextual factors shape its representation and interpretation. This study addresses this gap by examining how cultural and ideological contexts influence the construction of war metaphors in pandemic-related news discourse. Using China Daily (CD) and The New York Times (NYT) as case studies, this research employs a corpus-based comparative approach to explore how war metaphors construct public narratives around the pandemic. Adopting Kövecses’ extended Conceptual Metaphor Theory (extended CMT) as the theoretical framework, the analysis examines war metaphors across various schematic levels and assesses the impact of discursive, cultural, and ideological contexts on metaphorical representation. The findings reveal that while both newspapers use war metaphors to convey urgency and collective action, CD’s metaphor frames the pandemic in predominantly positive terms, highlighting unity and resilience, likely influenced by the historical legacy of war in Chinese culture and government sponsorship of CD. In contrast, NYT’s metaphorical use is more dynamic, emphasizing challenges and individual agency. This study contributes to metaphor research by illustrating how a shared conceptual metaphor can yield distinct communicative effects across different cultural and ideological settings, underscoring the need for multi-level metaphor analysis in cross-cultural discourse research.