Abstract
Covid-19 was declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization on 11 th March, 2020. Scientists and researchers immediately took interests to find a vaccine. While researchers in various discipline, particularly in medicine, began to study about the virus to help us understand the situation from various perspectives, there is limited research on linguistics analysis to date about Covid-19. Therefore, the present study aims to contribute to research in linguistics about Covid-19, by employing corpus-driven approach for data analysis. Online newspaper reports about Covid-19 were downloaded from the Star online from March 1 st to March 31 st , 2020. A total of 1018 news reports were processed and analysed, with 140 themes being identified.100 top collocates with the MI score set at a minimum of 5, using AntConc software revealed that verb and noun collocates co-occurred frequently with the node word Covid-19. Generally, thecollocates reflect fear, anxiety and uncertainty that majority of Malaysians feel. have. It also shows how the virus is taking a toll on Malaysia and Malaysians with regards to economy and social life. On the other hand, some of the collocates portrayed the government to be in total control of the situation, despite the threat to health and economic situations in the country. Suggestions for future research about Covid-19 include comparison of several newspaper reports from English newspapers in Malaysia, analysis of news report during extended movement control order (ECMO) in Malaysia or discourse analysis of crisis communication by political leaders in ASEAN.
Highlights
The world is regularly experiencing episodes of infectious diseases outbreaks in different parts of the world, such as Ebola, SARS, HINI influenza and other infectious diseases
The researchers, decided to collect data based on news report in March only, because it was during this time that cases of Covid-19 started to increase in Malaysia, which prompted the government to impose the first phase of ‘lockdown’ in the country, which is referred to as Movement Control Order (MCO).In addition, this particular time was the first wave of Covid-19 outbreak in Malaysia
The corpus linguistics analysis in the present study is based on newspaper reports in only one Malaysian newspaper, some of the collocates identified in this study are in the list of top twenty collocates of coronavirus identified by the Oxford Dictionary, as part of its effort to continually monitor the linguistics developments of some of the words and phrases which have become increasingly familiar in the context of the current global crisis
Summary
The world is regularly experiencing episodes of infectious diseases outbreaks in different parts of the world, such as Ebola, SARS, HINI influenza and other infectious diseases. The outbreak was reported in Wuhan, a major city of Hubei province in China. In a very short time, the disease spread very quickly and reached almost every part of China. Due to mass migration at that time for the Chinese New Year festival, the virus began to spread outside China. Researchers in various disciplines contribute to help us understand the situation from various perspectives. Some researchers have studied information behavior in natural disasters (Lin et al 2016; Pang & Anwar, in press) and crisis a Main & correspondent author eISSN: 2550-2131 ISSN: 1675-8021
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