Blends and Mental Models in the Time of the Covid-19 Pandemic: The Case of English Multimodal Op-Eds

The Covid-19 pandemic has affected not only the health of people but also their daily social practices and interactions, especially on electronic media platforms and news agencies. This paper aims to investigate British and American multimodal Op-Ed articles (opposite-editorials) on the Covid-19 pandemic from a sociocognitive perspective, find out where multimodal blends come from, find out to what extent the writer and the illustrator complement each other in order to co-shape the message of Op-Ed discourse, investigate the role of knowledge in Op-Ed articles, illustrate to what extent multimodal Op-Ed articles manage the relationship between presupposed and new knowledge, and investigate the similarities and the differences between British and American Op-Eds. A corpus of 24 multimodal Op-Ed articles is collected from British and American digital newspaper archives The Guardian and The New York Times, respectively. The selected data are analysed qualitatively and quantitatively. Abdel Raheem’s integrative model (2021a) is adopted to analyse the selected multimodal Op-Ed articles. It combines Conceptual Bending Theory (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002) and Mental Model Theory (van Dijk, 2014, 2023). The paper discusses cross-cultural similarities and differences in blending use and presents the crucial role of knowledge in Covid-19 Op-Ed articles production and understanding.