Critical Metaphor Analysis of Local Government Official Discourse for Public Emergencies

Emergency discourse, an effective tool for constructing and disseminating knowledge, plays a vital role in disaster relieving and public guidance during public emergencies. Against this background, this study, employing the local government press conferences during the periodic outbreak of COVID-19 in J City as data, carries out a critical metaphor analysis to examine the features and functions of metaphors in official emergency discourse. The result shows that war, competition, personification, fluid, architecture and other metaphors are widely used in the public emergency discourse to narrate the anti-epidemic behaviors and measures, the characteristics of virus, and the living facilities. By using these metaphors, the government stances and goals are clearly expressed in the anti-epidemic practices. As a preliminary work, this study claims that analyzing emergency discourse not only deepens out understanding of its language characteristics, but also serves as a supplement to emergency language service policy research, thereby providing intellectual support for the improvement of emergency language ability.