Abstract
The surge of new words and phrases accompanying the sudden COVID-19 outbreak has created new lexical and sociolinguistic changes that have become part of our lives. The emergence of COVID-19s coinages has remarkably increased to establish a trending base of global neologisms. The present study attempts to investigate the nature of the new English words and expressions that emerged in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis. It also identifies the type of word-formation processes that contributed to the emergence of these neologisms in the English language. The researchers compiled a corpus of 208 COVID-19-inspired neologisms from different sources, including social networking websites, search engines, blogs, and news articles. The analysis revealed that word-formation processes were so varied to cover all possible forms of derivation, including affixation, compounding, blending, clipping, acronyms, among others, along with dual word-formation processes, with compounding and blending being the most discrete. The findings showed that the flux of new terms demonstrates the creativity and vitality of the English language to respond to emerging situations in times of crisis. The study recommends that further research be carried out on the new terms that have been transferred to other languages as loanwords, loan-translations and loan-blends.
Highlights
Language is a social fact, which is prone to change, development, and evolution
The research problem in this study focuses on the nature of the new English words and expressions which emerged in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis
Since the focus of this paper is on the English language, it is worth noting that through the ages, English has demonstrated an insurmountable capacity for adaptability and coping with global events and subsequent changes (Hundt, Mollin & Pfenninger 2017)
Summary
Language is a social fact, which is prone to change, development, and evolution. The dynamic nature of languages enables them to cope with upheavals, events, and unforeseen circumstances. Language change is a universal property of living languages This change is typically influenced by multiple factors ranging from formal linguistic aspects of phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics to non-linguistic factors of social and pragmatic aspects of language use and cultural interaction. Innovations triggered by social and political events are typical of any time, especially in times of war, natural disasters, etc. The social, economic, psychological, educational, and mental health effects are universal, and so are the linguistics innovations and coinages, which have been shared by most of the world’s languages as loanwords or through translation. The state of emergency triggered by the coronavirus pandemic has set the scene for coining new terms associated with material changes that have become part of people’s everyday use worldwide. According to Lawson (2020: 1), the novel coronavirus has dictated its terms, forcing people to adapt to the new situation by using specific terms which help them “make sense of the changes that have suddenly become part of our everyday lives.”
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