COVID-19-related metaphors in Joe Biden's speeches

This work wants to examine the COVID-19-related metaphors adopted by US President Joe Biden in some of his public speeches. Due to every discourse is meticulously designed – and no linguistic choice is left to chance - it is interesting to understand why a specific metaphor was chosen according to the particular occasion each speech is created for, paying attention to the overall pandemic situation. The analysis follows a qualitative and interpretative approach. First of all, a corpus of ten texts was created choosing among Biden’s discourses along 2021, starting from his first inaugural address on the 20th of January. Then, an overview of the metaphors in the whole corpus was given and the main source domains were identified. After that, two specific speeches were chosen and examined. They were designed for two different occasions, therefore the tone, the structure and the development of the topics differed. The aim of this analysis is to observe how metaphors are used to build the discourses and how they contribute to develop the different passages of the two structures. This approach wants to clarify the crucial role of the rhetoric figure of metaphor in making a public speech effective, clear and understandable.