COVID-19 Neologisms: a Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis
Master thesis
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https://hdl.handle.net/11250/3136309Utgivelsesdato
2024Metadata
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Sammendrag
The COVID-19 pandemic brought about global changes to everyday life. This thesisinvestigates the emergence of neologisms in the English language in response to thesechanges. By collecting data from social media, specialized dictionaries, and other digitalsources, a list of COVID-19 neologisms was compiled. The study firstly aims to identify themost prevalent morphological processes and domains involved in the formation of these newterms. Secondly, this study aims to compare two well-known frameworks withinmorphology: item-and-arrangement and item-and-process. The resulting list of neologismsconsisted of a total of 917 items, wherein the predominant domain was pop-culture at 38.2%,whilst compounding was the most prevalent process at 72.2%. This study finds that theEnglish language has adopted a multitude of new words in response to the COVID-19pandemic, that they are sourced predominantly from cultural trends and media, and that theirprocesses reflect a preference for morphological creativity. This study also finds that IA isand effective model for analysing basic morphological structures, whilst IP is shown as moreflexible in its ability to analyse irregular morphological structures (such as blends).