Coronalexicon: A cross-lingual analysis of the language of the pandemic across English varieties

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ID: 286078
2021
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Abstract
The rapidly spreading infectious disease known as COVID-19 has had an unprecedented impact on the world and has created a specialized language. The present study aims to identify the various word-formation processes which are categorized under the medical, economic, social, and political lexemes. These categories reflect the coronalexicon used by the people in communicating medical and health-related information, the effects of the pandemic in the economy, the social behaviors affected by the war against the virus, and rising political and government-implemented programs. The investigation is focused on the meanings and extent of the use of pandemic lexemes across sampled English varieties (L1, L2 Asian, L2 African Englishes). This present study is underpinned by theoretical frameworks that explain why and how a language evolves (Linguistic Society of America, 1991; Aitchison, 2001; Yule, 2006; Crowley & Bowern, 2010 as cited in Assif Am-David, 2014; Liberman, 2020). It promotes the notion that turbulent times (e.g. wars in the past) or social crisis usher in lexical innovation. Data sources were derived from the News On Web (NOW) corpus with around 12.8 billion words. The corpus was searched starting from January 1, 2020 to June 1, 2021 The comprehensive study identified 571 pandemic words drawn from the News on the Web (NOW) corpus dating from January 1, 2020 to June 1, 2021. The investigation focused on the meanings of the identified words, which a linguist and a public health official validated. The terms on the social category of the pandemic lexicon constitute 43% of the overall wordlist. The second most extended list is the medical terms, constituting almost one-third of the total pandemic lexicon identified from the corpus. Terms in the economics category constitute 23% of the coronalexicon. Lastly, political terms representing governments' war with Covid-19 constitute 4% of the total words. The word-formation processes that operated in the production of the pandemic lexemes are compounds, blends, affixation, acronyms, and back-formation. Of the 571 pandemic lexemes listed, almost 90 percent of them are compounds. The most productive type is the compound adjectives, followed by endocentric compounds. Both blends and affixation constitute only 5%. Prefixes used are a~, anti~, non~, inter~, intra~, pre~, post~, con~, mid~, and near~ and suffixes used are ~ic, ~al, ~ly, and ~wise. One percent of the entire wordlist is comprised of acronyms. Finally, there is only one word under the back-formation category. Moreover, the findings revealed that L1 countries have the
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Authors Urbano, Cielo May S.
Journal Malay Journal
Year 2021
DOI
DOI not found
URL
https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etdm_deal/1
Keywords Keywords not found

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