PANDEMIC LEXIS IN THE MODERN ENGLISH MEDIA LANDSCAPE

Abstract

The outburst of the COVID-19 pandemic has brought forth replenishment of the Mass Media lexis. The paper aims at studying new word formation trends in the semantic field of COVID-19 in the English Media Landscape. The study of coinages connected with the coronavirus disease has the following goals: to determine ways of their word formation, word-building models and to single out their productive types.

Analysis of neologisms related to the coronavirus disease has shown that current limitations in people’s social lives have a strong impact on their communication and on their choice of language means and tools in particular. New elements of on-line communication: innovations in paralinguistic means and stylistic neologization of the Internet discourse suggest the appearance of a new communicative genre.

New coinages associated with COVID-19 are divided into the three thematic groups. The first class includes medical terms that replenished common lexis and nominations, belonging to the regulations of people’s lives; the second group is represented by lexical innovations of mundane character, which sometimes have their colloquial equivalents; the third category covers jocular words related to the topic of the coronavirus disease.

The findings of the investigation allow us to make a conclusion that the potential of telescopy, affixation, clipping and abbreviation as of major word-forming ways is retained, and that the role of compounding and composition in coining of split nominations (word combinations) is increasing. New mixed abbreviation types have been described, the emergence of their new derivatives has been registered. The data also show that English has become a donor for other languages providing terms- internationalisms (e.g. lockdown, sanitizer).

Semantic word formation on the material of coinages from the English Internet discourse is attested by metaphorisation of common lexis. Determinization of medical lexemes and processes of lexical units’ migration between the different linguistic styles of English can be retraced.