“The pingdemic has been a greater challenge than Covid itself”: semantic prosodies in UK newspaper articles during the pandemic

Abstract

In July 2021, the UK recorded an increase in self-isolation notifications to the users of the NHS Covid-19 contact-tracing app. The term pingdemic was coined and used widely in the media to refer to this period of increased notifications. Whilst existing research on language evolution during Covid-19 focuses on the negative connotations of the term pandemic, little attention has been dedicated yet to the connotations of the term pingdemic. Thus, this study contributes a com- parison between the semantic prosody of pingdemic and its benchmark pandemic, through the corpus analysis of 628 UK printed newspaper articles, published during the peak in notifications to add to the increasing knowledge of how the pandemic evolved in the UK and how AI has had an impact on it. With the aid of the Sketch Engine, through the analysis of keywords, collocations and Word Sketch Difference visualisations, we found that pingdemic held a more negative semantic prosody than pandemic.