Idioms in Croatian and German newspaper articles about the coronavirus

Abstract

Pandemija koronavirusa je leta 2020 povzročila številne spremembe v življenjskem slogu in vedenju ljudi. Nanjo so bile vezane tudi teme v časopisnih člankih v obdobju med marcem in junijem 2020 in prav na podlagi teh je bil oblikovan korpus za to raziskavo. Časopisni članki so se osredotočali na boj proti virusom, odzive na zaprtje, gospodarstvo po zaprtju in načine spopadanja s krizo v EU in svetu. Analiza temelji na teoriji konvencionalnega figurativnega jezika in je uporabljena z namenom raziskovanja, kako so omenjene teme v izbranem hrvaškem in nemškem korpusu predstavljene z idiomi oz. metaforičnimi izrazi. V izhodišču so bila postavljena raziskovalna vprašanja o tem, pri katerih s koronavirusom povezanih temah se pojavljajo idiomi, kateri ciljni koncepti so v njih izraženi, katere metafore in izvirne koncepte je mogoče v njih prepoznati in ali obstajajo podobnosti med hrvaščino ter nemščino.

The coronavirus pandemic in 2020 led to a number of changes in people’s lifestyles and behaviour. These were the topics covered in newspaper articles in the period between March and June 2020, which created the corpus for this investigation. Newspaper articles focused on the fight against viruses, reactions to lockdown, the post-lockdown economy and how the EU and the world were coping with the crisis. The analysis in this paper is based on the Conventional Figurative Language Theory (CFLT) in order to investigate how these topics are represented by metaphorical idioms in a selected Croatian and German corpus. The research questions in this paper are as follows: In which topics related to coronavirus do idioms appear? What target concepts are expressed using idioms? What metaphors and source domains can be identified in idioms? Are there any similarities between Croatian and German?