The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has caused a lot of changes in our everyday life which have also been reflected in the way we speak. New concepts and ideas needed to be named to find their place in the lexicon. It led to the emergence of many new words and expressions in the English language. Some of them aim at naming specific things like the new virus itself (i e COVID-19) while the others are examples of language creativity and wordplay, for example, the word cornteen imitating the American way of pronouncing the widely used word quarantine.
Currently, it is almost impossible to say which new words will get a permanent place in the vocabulary and which of them are just occasional coinages that will disappear once the pandemic is over. In order to answer this question, more time is needed but what is possible now is to trace the development of the English lexicon. For this purpose, the new COVID-19 words will have to be documented and analyzed. As the pandemic has not finished yet and other words can theoretically still be coined, multi-step research is required. This topic has already gained some attention from the scientific community, but there are only a few studies that analyze the new COVID-19 words. Having said that, the present study is aimed at contributing to the documentation and analysis of the new coinages.
Table of Contents
1 Introduction
2 What are ‘new words’?
3 Word-formation patterns
3.1 Affixation
3.2 Prefixation
3.3 Suffixation
3.4 Compounding
3.5 Conversion
3.6 Back-formation
3.7 Clipping
3.8 Acronyms and abbreviations
3.9 Blending
3.10 Loan words
3.11 Onomatopoeia
3.12 Multi-word expressions
4 Studying of COVID-19 neologisms
5 Methodology
5.1 Collecting and analyzing data
5.2 Limitations
6 Results
7 Conclusion
Research Objectives and Themes
This paper aims to document and analyze newly emerged terms related to the COVID-19 pandemic, examining their morphological structure, parts of speech, and the timing of their entry into the lexicon. It seeks to answer how the English language has adapted to describe the unprecedented social and lifestyle changes caused by the global crisis.
- Documentation of COVID-19 related neologisms and ad-hoc formations.
- Classification of word-formation patterns used in pandemic-related coinages.
- Diachronic analysis of terms to distinguish between novel coinages and reintroduced words.
- Statistical assessment of word frequency and parts of speech in the COVID-19 discourse.
Excerpt from the Book
3.1 Affixation
“Affixation involves adding bound morphemes to existing roots, which result in newly created derivatives” (Al-Salman & Haider 2021: 31). For example, the word slacker which means "a person who shirks work, or avoids exertion, exercise, etc." (Oxford English Dictionary 2021) consists of the base slack- and the affix, namely, suffix -er.
According to Quirk et al., affixation encompasses two subtypes, prefixation and suffixation (Quirk et al. 1985: 1520; cited in Schmid, 2016).
Summary of Chapters
1 Introduction: Discusses the emergence of new English terminology as a response to the lifestyle changes forced by the COVID-19 pandemic.
2 What are ‘new words’?: Provides a theoretical background on lexical development, covering stages like creation, consolidation, and establishment.
3 Word-formation patterns: Defines and analyzes the morphological processes, such as compounding, blending, and affixation, used to create new words.
4 Studying of COVID-19 neologisms: Reviews existing literature and studies that have analyzed COVID-19 neologisms to establish a foundation for the current research.
5 Methodology: Describes the systematic collection of data from various internet sources and the methods used to categorize and analyze the selected terms.
6 Results: Presents the findings regarding the parts of speech, origins, and formation patterns of the collected COVID-19 terminology.
7 Conclusion: Synthesizes the main findings and highlights the status of pandemic-related words as primarily new coinages currently in the creation stage.
Keywords
COVID-19, neologisms, word-formation, morphology, affixation, compounding, blending, linguistics, lexicon, pandemic, language change, ad-hoc formation, sociopragmatics, English language, Coronavirus
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the primary focus of this research?
The work focuses on documenting and analyzing new terms and expressions that have emerged in the English language due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Which linguistic fields are covered in the paper?
The study primarily focuses on morphology and word-formation patterns in the context of recent socio-linguistic developments.
What is the central research question?
The research explores the parts of speech, the timing of coinages, and the most productive word-formation patterns behind pandemic-related terminology.
What methodology does the author use?
The author collected a corpus of approximately 300 words from various internet sources, dictionaries, and news platforms, which were then filtered and analyzed for morphological structure and frequency.
What are the main findings regarding word formation?
The study concludes that compounding is the most productive word-formation process for COVID-19 terms, followed significantly by blending.
Which word types were identified as most common?
The majority of the analyzed COVID-19 coinages function as nouns.
What is an 'ad-hoc formation'?
Ad-hoc formations are intentionally coined words created to describe novel concepts when existing vocabulary is insufficient, often appearing in specific contexts before becoming widely institutionalized.
How does the pandemic affect the lexicon?
The pandemic has triggered rapid language creativity, particularly in media and informal communication, to help speakers name new realities and social practices.
- Quote paper
- Aleksandra Martin (Author), 2021, Word-formation at the time of COVID-19, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/1165467
