From Sididoms to Coronapofigists (Names of Persons During the Coronavirus Pandemic)

Abstract

This article reviews the new lexical material related to the coronavirus pandemic. The empirical material was collected in the electronic database Integrum. The subject of the collected material are names of persons which were used in electronic mass media (newspapers, magazines, blogs, social networks). The volume of the lexical corpus counts about 90 neolexemes, which makes up a significant part of the collected corpus of lexical, word-formation, semantic innovations in the Russian language. Presumably, their number may be more than 600. The following thematic groups are revealed: 1) coronavirus patients; 2) law-abiding citizens complied with quarantine requirements; 3) quarantine violators; 4) alarmists; 5) victims of the pandemic; 6) volunteers; 7) medical personnel; 8) legal Offenders; 9) children born between December 2020 and March 2021. In the analyzed material, there is graphical and orthographic variability, reflecting the spoken language in written texts; the grade of unification is rather low. The Innovations are: 1) direct borrowings (their number is not too big); 2) calques; 3) actualized lexemes (under the influence of Anglo-American words); 4) words appeared in the Russian language but inspired by the pandemic theme and the extraordinary situation of severe quarantine. Most of the lexical innovations are author’s individual words; the share of words belonging to conventional lexemes is about 20–30 ones. The research methods are derived from the research questions, i.e. systemic, classification, deductive, inductive ones.