A Discourse Analysis of Addustour Newspaper Headlines of COVID-19

Abstract

The current study makes a media discourse analysis for thirty of Addustour Arabic online newspaper’s editorial headlines of COVID-19 in terms of Galperin's (1977) framework of lexical rhetorical devices (metaphor, metonymy, and irony); adopting a descriptive qualitative approach. The idea of metaphor source domain suggested by the conceptual metaphor theory is employed to organize metaphors in groups. The analysis is confined to those articles’ headlines written in 2020 and contained one of the words: COVID-19 (coronavirus), the epidemic, and the virus. The frequency of the devices is presented in tables followed by illustrative passages of metaphor domains and metonymy types. The findings of this study are justified depending on the researchers’ backgrounds and the nature of the data. The analysis exhibits writers' preference for metaphor rather than metonymy and irony. Both organism and warfare metaphor source domains are extensively employed to express the efforts of medical staff/governments along with the epidemiological and political situations of the world. The great interest in the warfare domain could be explained in light of the effect of Arabic poems taught to students at Jordanian schools and the wars surrounding Jordan. On the other hand, the part to signal the whole metonymical relation appears only once. To avoid legal inquiry, irony is never used.