THEMATIC STRATIFICATION OF THE NEOLOGICAL CORONAVIRUS LEXICON OF MODERN GERMAN

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of current changes in the lexical structure of the German language, namely to the neological units that appeared within it in connection with the global coronavirus pandemic. The relevance of the research is due to the very formulation of the problem, as the question of the influence of today’s global epidemic on the lexicon of different languages is obvious to both speakers and researchers of this field. The methodological basis of the research was a system-functional approach. The paper differentiates the terms “neologism”, “occasionalism”, “lexical innovation”, “neological unit”, analyzes tokens relevant for description of the new coronaviral reality. The source of the empiric material was an online dictionary of neological coronalexics of the Leibniz Institute of German Language, that collects and documents lexical innovations of the “new reality”, as well as gives examples of use from the authentic german media. The author examines some nonlinguistic factors, including the imposition of sanitary and epidemiological rules, prevailing public sentiment, changing models of interpersonal private communication, formats of work and study, recreation and leisure, as well as areas of social life, which were most affected. Special attention is paid to the medicalization of speech in general and its role in enlarging the neological lexicon of modern German. The study focuses on the terms Corona, Covid, COVID-19 and their word-forming derivatives, which make the most numerous group of neological units of the coronavirus era. Reflections are given on the inner motivation of the neosemantism Social Distancing, loaned from the English language and widespread in many linguistic cultures, as well as its alternative forms soziale Distanz and soziale Distanzierung, used in German as loan-translation. The German language as a social phenomenon reacts very productively to the reformatting of the life and consciousness of speakers in connection with the pandemic, actively generating new vocabulary, which is classified in the proposed scientific paper by the most common lexical and thematic groups.