Neosemantization of the lexemes štam and buster and language adaptation of the nominations of coronavirus variants in modern mass media

Abstract

This article offers a description of the names of COVID-19 variants as used in nowadays media texts. A contrastive analysis of the linguistic data collected from the Den′ and Ukraїns′ka Pravda issues of 2021–2022 and the dictionary show that the nomination štam ‘strain, variant’ has undergone a significant modification so that its semantic range accounts for the naming of COVID-19 variants. This lexeme is often used along with grammatically subordinated nouns kovid ‘COVID’ and koronavirus coronavirus’ and modifiers such as novyj ‘new’, novovyjavlenyj ‘newly discovered’, zaraznyj ‘contagious’, and smertonosnyj ‘fatal’ having a powerful effect on a consumer of mass media content. The role of the functional equivalent of the noun štam is rarely performed by the lexemes variant ‘variant’, mutatsija ‘mutation’, and kovid-mutatsija ‘COVID mutation’, and the respective expressions show at least two synonymous forms, which are an ad jective-noun form as associated with the country where the COVID-19 was first discovered and one-word form as based on the Greek letter. The paper also highlights the lexeme del’takron ‘Deltacron’. The ongoing process of the linguistic adaptation of the ‘variant’ names is reflected in the multivariant spelling of these names. Some compound nouns point out to the use of hyphens, e.g., del’ta-štam ‘Delta variant’ and omicron-štam ‘Omicron variant’, whereas others do not, e.g., štam del’ta. The author discusses the use of the names with the letters of the Greek alphabet in other compound nouns like beta-testuvannja ‘beta-testing’ and the activation of the lexical items vaktsyna ‘vaccine’, vaktsynatsija ‘vaccination’, and buster ‘booster’. Keywords: lexicon, noun, adjective, emotionally expressive vocabulary