Corpus-based discourse analysis of the lexemes related to COVID-19 pandemic in the German magazine Der Spiegel (online version)

Abstract

The article gives a detailed insight into pandemic media discourse by revealing and analyzing its lexical changes. The research aims to observe the dynamic processes in the vocabulary: the intensity and usage frequency of the key discourse words, neologisms, borrowings, the reflection processes of important social and political events in the vocabulary. The research is based on the DIMEAN multilevel linguistic and discourse analysis model, elements of corpus analysis, concordance compilation with AntConc program and Voyant Tools web application, as well as methods of dictionary definitions and contextual semantic analysis. The material of the study is based on the current theme-based publications from the German news website Der Spiegel dated 2020 and 2022. Structuring the material into two sub-corps (according to the year, 50 articles each) enables to demonstrate a linguistic analysis of a specific time period and present our observations on lexical changes of German COVID-19 pandemic media discourse. The study applies both traditional and modern methods of computer analysis of modern media discourse that is relevant to the current linguistic study approach. The new multilevel comparative analysis of the theme-based media discourse by means of corpus analysis allows to track lexical changes and to observe the dynamics and evaluation of topics in the socio-political discourse. As a result of conducted research in two sub-corps were revealed the most frequent lexemes taking into account macro- and micro-contexts; in the group of the keywords most relevant for the two periods the contextual-semantic analysis was provided.