EVENT STRUCTURE METAPHORS IN POLITICAL SPEECHES ON COVID 19 CRISIS DELIVERED BY THE GOVERNMENT LEADERS

ABSTRACT :The study aims to describe the use of the event structure metaphors in the political speechesdelivered by the government leaders around the world (America, England, China, Indonesia, Turkey, Canada,France, Greek, Germany, Italy, Russia, Sweden, Japan) during the Covid 19 crisis. Thus the study will illustratehow politicians conceptualize the Covid 19 crisis to protect their image and reputation. The data of the studyconsists of fifty eight political speeches on Covid 19 crisis given by the government leaders around the worldfrom December 2019 to March 2021.The data is obtained from the internet. In line with the aim of the study, theresearch uses a descriptive survey design. Qualitative method were applied by using Critical metaphor analysismethodology that is part of Critical discourse analysis. Data analysis was done based on Lakoff’s EventStructure Metaphor Theory (1992) and Benoit’s (2018) image repair strategies. Also, the corpus is analysedusing the Antconc software program. The results reveal that the political leaders employed two of Benoit’s(2018) image repair strategies, the reduce offensiveness and the evasion of responsibility, via the event structuremetaphors to protect their image and reputation during the Covid 19 crisis.

KEYWORDS : Covid 19 crisis, image, metaphor, political leaders‟ speech, reputation