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.