The Crisis in Discourse: As an Event, aDiscursive Semantics, and aCulture.

Abstract

»La crise sanitaire« (›the health crisis‹) that began in 2020 has had an impact on all levels of society, notably in the linguistic realm, where it has generated an abundance of discourse and lexical creations. The present article is based on a corpus from French print news corpus drawn from the databases Factiva and Europresse. The concept of »crisis«, a core notion in the underlying reflection, has brought in its wake many linguistic issues, including the gender of »covid-19«, the various different names for the so-called crisis (»pandemic«, »health crisis«, etc.), and the competition between »social distancing« and »physical distancing«. To begin, I use some of the many concepts available in the domain of discourse analysis to analyze the event itself and the naming process, and I make some proposals in the framework of discursive semantics. Next, I tackle the issue of lexical creativity while distinguishing two linguistic spheres, that of institutional discourse and that of the discourse of ordinary people. I study some of these neologisms by noting their spread throughout the current discourse and their inclusion in common French dictionaries. Lastly, I pave the way toward a contrastive discourse analysis that takes languages and cultures into account.