Coronapedia : a corpus-driven analysis of COVID-19 newspeak and implications for language change

Abstract EN

Challenging circumstances often generate new forms of expression.

The particular challenges of the Covid-19 (also known as Corona Virus) pandemic have led to the emergence of neologisms and novel expressions.

The availability of Big Data technology has made investigating the nature and specifics of this language change possible.This study aims to identify and categorize newly emerging vocabulary related to the Covid-19, by investigating frequencies, collocates, and chronological development.

It adopts a corpus-driven quantitative analysis, accompanied by qualitative analysis based on intuition, to consider the following research questions: What new vocabularies have emerged related to the coronavirus and are they significantly frequent replacing their normal language counterparts? What are the sources and etymologies behind these new items of vocabulary? How are they formed? How have these terms developed over time? This study adopts a corpus linguistic methodology by quantitatively and qualitatively investigating the publicly available Coronavirus Corpus at (english-corpora.org) which is comprised of approximately 341 million words.

Frequencies, collocations, keywords and chronological comparisons of ‘newspeak’ will be commented upon, followed by an etymological analysis of these items and a documentation of their word-formation processes according to the Bauer (1983) word-formation model, developed and updated by Author (2015).Preliminary findings include a catalogue of emerging neologisms such as covidiot, coronacation, Aunt Rona and quarantini, which are formed by blending, clipping and compounding.

These are provided in Appendix A, along with explanations of meanings and etymologies of the terms.

Phrases such as flattening the curve have undergone semantic deviation to correspond to new trends related to the virus, and there are cases of language play (Danet, 2001) such as fattening the curve and COVID-10 relating to overeating and putting on weight as a result of the lockdown and stay-home status.