Pandemia é filme de terror: memes e a conceptualização de pandemia sob a perspectiva da Integração Conceptual

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic is a phenomenon that has gained prominence for its dimension and impact on societies. To better understand how it has been conceptualized in social networks, we resorted to Applied Cognitive Linguistics (SALIÉS, 2020). For this end, we analysed memes posted on public profiles from March 2020 to December 2021. The memes were selected by means of a search engine and the pandemic hashtag (#pandemia). Politics, economics and representations of the pandemic as a life lesson and a war were recurrent themes. However, there were less frequent memes in which the metaphor THE PANDEMIC IS A HORROR FILM emerged (n=19). They got our attention and became objects of analysis in this research. The analysis was based on the tenets of Conceptual Integration (FAUCONNIER; TURNER, 2002), Mental Spaces (FAUCONNIER, 1997), metaphors, metonymies (LAKOFF; JOHNSON, 1980; LITTLEMORE, 2015) as well on those of multimodal productions (FORCEVILLE; URIOS-APARISI, 2009; BERNARDO, VELOZO; ABREU, 2019; HORTA, 2015) and memes during the pandemic (DAMASCENO, 2020; WERNECK, 2020; ALMEIDA; SANTOS, 2020). The analysis point to processes of recategorization motivated by the pandemic, in which villains are categorized as good guys and moral models to be followed. From this perspective, memes in the present research sought to make the population aware of what is moral or immoral in a period characterized by challenges to public health