Linguistic repercussions of COVID-19: A corpus study on four languages-Reference-Cited by-同舟云学术

Linguistic repercussions of COVID-19: A corpus study on four languages

Published:2022-01-01 Issue:1 Volume:8 Page:751-766
ISSN:2300-9969
Container-title:Open Linguistics
language:en
Short-container-title:

Author:

Cartier Emmanuel¹,Onysko Alexander²,Winter-Froemel Esme³,Zenner Eline⁴,Andersen Gisle⁵,Hilberink-Schulpen Béryl⁶,Nederstigt Ulrike⁶,Peterson Elizabeth⁷,van Meurs Frank⁶

Affiliation:

1. Département de linguistique, Université Sorbonne 13 Paris Nord , Paris , France

2. Department of English, University of Klagenfurt , Klagenfurt 9020 , Austria

3. Neuphilologisches Institut/Romanistik, University of Würzburg , Würzburg , Germany

4. Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics , KU Leuven , Leuven , Belgium

5. Department of Professional and Intercultural Communication , Norges Handelshøyskole , Bergen , Norway

6. Department of Language and Communication, Radboud University , Nijmegen , The Netherlands

7. Department of Languages , University of Helsinki , Finland

Abstract

Abstract The global reach of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing localized policy reactions provides a case to uncover how a global crisis translates into linguistic discourse. Based on the JSI Timestamped Web Corpora that are automatically POS-tagged and accessible via SketchEngine, this study compares French, German, Dutch, and English. After identifying the main names used to denote the virus and its disease, we extracted a total of 1,697 associated terms (according to logDice values) retrieved from news media data from January through October 2020. These associated words were then organized into categories describing the properties of the virus and the disease, their spatio-temporal features and their cause–effect dependencies. Analyzing the output cross-linguistically and across the first 10 months of the pandemic, a fairly stable semantic discourse space is found within and across each of the four languages, with an overall clear preference for visual and biomedical features as associated terms, though significant diatopic and diachronic shifts in the discourse space are also attested.

Publisher

Walter de Gruyter GmbH

Subject

Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics

Link

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/opli-2022-0222/pdf

Reference49 articles.

1. Abdul-Mageed, M., A. R. Elmadany, E. M. B. Nagoudi, D. Pabbi, K. Verma, and R. Lin. 2021. Mega-COV: A Billion-Scale Dataset of 100+ Languages for COVID-19. In Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume, 3402–20, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics. 10.18653/v1/2021.eacl-main.298.

2. Aslam, F., T. M. Awan, J. H. Syed, A. Kashif, and M. Parveen. 2020. “Sentiments and emotions evoked by news headlines of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak.” Humanities & Social Sciences Communication 7, 23.

3. Bai, G. H. 2020. “Fighting COVID-19 with Mongolian fiddle stories.” Multilingua 39(5), 577–86.

4. Balnat, V. 2020. “Unter Beobachtung: Corona-Wortschatz im Deutschen und Französischen [Under observation: Corona-Vocabulary in German and French].” Nouveaux Cahiers d’Allemand: Revue de linguistique et de didactique. Association des Nouveaux Cahiers d’Allemand. (hal-02931171).

5. Belhaj, S. 2020. “La pandémie Covid-19 et l’émergence d’un nouveau technolecte [The Covid-19 pandemic and the emergence of new technological vocabulary].” Revue Langues, Cultures et Sociétés 6(1), 28–38.