ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces a case study in cross-cultural cognitive linguistics focused on the variable use of English modal verbs conveying new COVID-triggered experiential metaphors developed by a focus group of young and multicultural participants in online debate, all non-native speakers of English - a language that they used as a “lingua franca” (ELF) while participating in an online intercultural interaction. The case study intended to determine whether the group’s pragmatic use of modals actually diverged from habitual high/low-context schemata related to the multicultural participants’ different native sociolinguistic communities. Schema divergence was assumed to be prompted by the particular “emotion-raising” topic chosen for the case study - namely, the probable fake news on the causes of the COVID-19 pandemic, as they were conveyed by a journalistic text submitted for discussion. More specifically, the case study explored the new cognitive metaphors of “inclusion”, “exclusion”, and “seclusion” developed by the participants in relation to their involvement with the topic - which eventually developed further to encompass the positive and negative consequences of pandemic on their social and psychological well-being. The participants in the online debate who were migrants from the high-context cultures of Nigeria, Morocco, and Yemen unexpectedly developed novel low-context epistemic metaphors of “inclusion” triggered by their sense of a possible freedom from their native social constraints, granted by remote communication without video, concealing their ethnic and sociocultural origin. On the contrary, participants from the middle/high-context cultures of the Southern European countries of Italy and Greece showed a strengthening of the high-context deontic metaphors of “exclusion” and “seclusion”. Such novel metaphors are here seen as evidence of the extent to which possible fake news and media disinformation contribute to modifying the young people’s perception of their social and psychological state within today’s increasingly changing virtual and multicultural contexts of interaction.
