| Abstract [eng] |
The outbreak of COVID-19 and its aftermath will have a major impact on people around the world. Due to its rapidly spreading threat, this virus has brought many significant daily changes in people’s lives. One of the key challenges that countries around the world were facing was the prevention the spread of the COVID-19 virus and to respond immediately to the circumstances of this upcoming danger. In order to be able to cope with the challenges and difficulties posed by the spread of the virus, disciplinary power becomes one of the essential links between order and obedience. A valid discipline is a relationship of power and control that makes a person obedient. This mechanism of power is evident when it is directed to the control of the body: the control of space, activity, and time. In the face of a pandemic, threat rhetoric has become one of the most widely used communication tools. The importance of rhetoric is related to its practical power of the word. This is a concept that is identified very differently depending on the context in which it is used. The use of the concept of rhetoric is associated with the ability to persuade or influence an audience by presenting their position, in other words, it is an art of argumentation. In the rhetoric of threat, metaphors are one of the inseparable aspects of language. They are widely used in the COVID-19 pandemic. The use of metaphors involves the identification of the virus itself. The metaphor makes it possible to perceive a new meaning in making a semantic effect on the recipient of information. Its use in discourse forces us to interpret it according to a new meaning without losing the old one. The metaphor intersects word and sentence, event and meaning. metaphor is the intersection of meaning and image. Using metaphore to identify the COVID - 19 pandemic have become an important element of political rhetoric. At first, identifying a pandemic with war might have seemed like an effective way to manage the state of emergency in the country. War symbolizes speed, the unification of people against a "common enemy," and the concept of war increases moral awareness. In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, war metaphors have become infinitely important. Their use in political rhetoric prepares the population for the difficulties they may face in their daily lives. By linking the formation of new concepts and the process of linguistic thinking, conceptual metaphors relate to human experience, emotional impressions, and reactions. In this time of pandemic, it is the metaphors used in threat rhetoric to re-understand the reality influenced by the spread of the virus, while conceptual metaphors allow us to interpret the fundamentals of reality and take into account how perceptions of that reality interpret the image of a pandemic. Since 2020, the whole of Lithuania has faced a new reality in which security and prevention of the spread of the virus have become a daily norm. Given the changing epidemiological situation, world leaders, including Lithuania, have had to face certain challenges that have focused on security and the well-being of the country as a whole. Publicly available information about the hitherto unknown virus has caused anxiety and fear among people around the world. Although the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Lithuania was sufficiently successful, together with the new wave of coronavirus in the country, the newly elected Government faced even greater challenges and difficulties in successfully managing the emergency in Lithuania. Information about the situation in the fight against the pandemic, the dangers it poses, and the control of the virus have changed people’s perceptions not only about the threat and security, but also the rhetoric itself. |
