The contribution presents a study on figurative language of the first months of the COVID-19 crisis in Italian online newspapers. Particularly, we contrast topics and metaphorical language used by journalists in the first and second phase of the government response to the pandemic in Spring 2020. The analysis is conducted on a journalistic corpus collected between February 24th and June 3rd, 2020. The analysis is performed using both quantitative and qualitative approaches, combining Structural Topic Modelling (Roberts et al. 2016), Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), and qualitative-corpus based metaphor analysis (Charteris-Black, 2004). We find a significant shift in topics discussed across Phase 1 and Phase 2, and interesting overlaps in topic-specific metaphors. Using qualitative corpus analysis, we present a more in-depth case study discussing metaphorical collocations of the topics of Economy and Society

翻译：本文针对意大利在线报纸在新冠疫情危机最初几个月中的比喻性语言展开研究。我们着重对比了2020年春季政府应对疫情第一阶段与第二阶段记者们所使用的主题与隐喻性语言。分析基于2020年2月24日至6月3日期间采集的新闻语料库，采用定性与定量相结合的研究路径，融合了结构主题建模（Roberts等人，2016）、概念隐喻理论（Lakoff & Johnson, 1980）以及基于语料库的定性隐喻分析（Charteris-Black, 2004）。研究发现，第一阶段与第二阶段所讨论的主题存在显著转变，且主题特异性隐喻出现了有趣的重叠。通过定性语料分析，我们围绕"经济"与"社会"这两个主题的隐喻搭配开展了更为深入的案例研究。