Covidiot, Elbow Bump, and Frontliner: Language Change in the Covid-19 Era

Abstract

 This paper investigates Covid-19 vocabulary from the morphological and semantic viewpoints. It explores a set of Covid-related words and phrases used in the news during the pandemic either as new lexemes or as novel meanings. First, a collection of new words selected from dictionaries and word lists in the web and checked in two British newspapers – The Guardian and The Independent – are described in terms of the word-formation and semantic processes forming them. Second, through a quantitative analysis conducted in the Coronavirus Corpus, the new words are classified either as neologisms and neosemanticisms that are going to be institutionalised and become a permanent part of the English vocabulary, or as nonce words that are destined to pass away once the pandemic is over. Third, through a qualitative analysis of the collocations with the term Covid-19 in the corpus, the new meanings associated with Covid lexicon are investigated. In particular, the main metaphorical associations are studied, resulting in three primary domains that are relevant to the pandemic: namely, ‘War’, ‘Fire’, and ‘Disaster’. The paper shows (1) the importance of a specialised corpus for the study of language change through a widespread phenomenon such as Covid-19; and, more generally, (2) the contribution of digital transformation to the development of lexicography and lexicology.