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This study investigates Facebook posts related to '校正回歸 retrospective adjustment; to backlog ', a neologism coined during the first outbreak of COVID-19 in Taiwan in May 2021. It identifies 19 linguistic metaphors used to refer to this neologism; these are classified into the following eight metaphor groups: FINANCIAL STATEMENTS, LIE, PROPAGANDA, RECREATION, SCOUNDREL, STRAW, TRAFFIC CONGESTION and TRICKS; among these, TRAFFIC CONGESTION and RECREATION groups occur in posts of diverging polarities; the remaining six groups occur in posts exclusively expressing negative evaluation. Moreover, this study identifies a rhetorical strategy, parallelism, which occurs exclusively in the negative polarity and triggers a negative interpretation of value-neutral metaphors. Considering the aspects highlighted via the use of certain metaphors, it predicts that, for the conceptualisation of this neologism, objective metaphors are more likely to be used when the emphasis is on things that occur without the involvement of any agent's volition; subjective metaphors are more likely to be used when the user emphasises the agent's volition underlying a behaviour, including the manipulation of the number of infected patients, concealment of the truth, and transmission of false information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes how political aspirations and convictions during Taiwan's authoritarian period (from the 1940s to 1996) are expressed through first-person plural pronouns. Combining both corpus-assisted method and discourse historical analysis (DHA, Wodak et al. 1999), we compared the speeches delivered by the presidents – Chiang Kai-shek (CKS, 1955–1975), Chiang Ching-kuo (CCK, 1978–1988), and Lee Teng-hui (LTH, 1989–1996) – from the one-party domination era to the time of the direct presidential elections in 1996. Moreover, by locating lexical items in the co-texts and checking the collocates, we have tried to find referents of we against changing socio-political contexts. The meaning of we has changed from representing Chinese compatriots on the Chinese mainland and the revolutionary militia in CKS's speeches to an over-inclusion and more hearer-dominant (HD) we in CCK's speeches. A "wandering we" was found in LTH's speeches with which a well-defined national collectivity was difficult to identify in the late 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By analyzing naming strategies and conceptual metaphors for SARS in three major broadsheet newspapers, The Liberty Times and The United Daily News in Taiwan, and The People's Daily in China, this article demonstrates how the political agendas and underlying ideologies of newspapers permeate their use of metaphors. Taking critical metaphor analysis (Charteris-Black, 2004) as the theoretical framework, we analyze how the DISEASE IS WAR metaphor, in particular, constructs Self and Other, as well as several other metaphors (e.g. DISEASE IS A NATURAL DISASTER/ A DISASTER IN GENERAL). We argue that all the linguistic devices under consideration represent SARS as an issue in the domain of political rather than medical discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]