COVID-19 trending neologisms and word formation processes in English

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The surge of new words and phrases accompanying the sudden COVID-19 outbreak has created new lexical and sociolinguistic changes that have become part of our lives. The emergence of COVID-19’s coinages has remarkably increased to establish a trending base of global neologisms. The present study attempts to investigate the nature of the new English words and expressions that emerged in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis. It also identifies the type of word-formation processes that contributed to the emergence of these neologisms in the English language. The researchers compiled a corpus of 208 COVID-19-inspired neologisms from different sources, including social networking websites, search engines, blogs, and news articles. The analysis revealed that word-formation processes were so varied to cover all possible forms of derivation, including affixation, compounding, blending, clipping, acronyms, among others, along with dual word-formation processes, with compounding and blending being the most discrete. The findings showed that the flux of new terms demonstrates the creativity and vitality of the English language to respond to emerging situations in times of crisis. The study recommends that further research be carried out on the new terms that have been transferred to other languages as loanwords, loan-translations and loan-blends.

作者简介

Saleh Al-Salman

Applied Science Private University

编辑信件的主要联系方式.
Email: salehalsalman2000@gmail.com

Professor of Linguistics, former Dean and Chair of the English Department. He has been involved in the teaching of language, linguistics, and translation at the under-graduate and post-graduate levels. He received Fulbright and DAAD Research Fellowships in 1996 and 2002, respectively. He is a published writer and member of the editorial boards of specialized and refereed research journals. His research interests include theoretical and applied linguistics, semantics, pragmatics and translation studies.

Al Arab st. 21, Amman, Jordan, 11931

Ahmad Haider

Applied Science Private University

Email: Ah_haider86@yahoo.com

received his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. His current research focuses on how political events are socially, discursively and linguistically represented in media combining Corpus Linguistics and (Critical) Discourse Analysis. His main areas of interest include corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics and translation studies. Dr. Haider has built different large Arabic and English corpora. He professionally masters different Corpus Linguistic software packages.

Amman, Jordan

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