How the Headquarters stole Christmas - on the ways of conceptualizing measures and strategies to fight the coronavirus pandemic

This paper explores the figurative language that was used in Croatian media discourse to describe measures and strategies for combating the coronavirus pandemic. Based on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Conceptual Integration Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis, the aim of the study is to examine how metaphorical language was employed to shape public understanding and responses to the pandemic. The corpus containing news articles from 2020 – 2021 was analyzed to address three key research questions: the types of figurative expressions associated with pandemic responses, the conceptual mechanisms they are based on and their role in the pandemic discourse. The analysis reveals that many expressions were based on familiar metaphors, such as the traffic light coding system to denote risk levels, but novel conceptualizations also emerged that reflected unique aspects of the pandemic circumstances. The results demonstrate how figurative language can function both as a cognitive tool for understanding the pandemic and public health policies and for establishing power dynamics during crises.