Abstract:
COVID-19 outbreak deranged every aspect of society, turn the whole globe upside down as well as our language. Assuming that language is dynamic and subjected to changes, the global health crisis of 2020 cannot but had a tremendous impact in term of language. Linguists and Researchers attached great importance to the phenomenon, since there’s a strong connection between language and society, such events are essential cases of study. For this reason, this thesis starting points are M.A.K. Halliday Systemic Functional Linguistics and the Foucauldian Discourse Analysis theories and its aim is to list and analyze a random sample of neologisms in Chinese and English collected and filtered from the several lists and top ten found online during the pandemic. This hoping to show how and when these words born and draw up a corpus of example to understand how they’re used and to investigate what Foucault advocates to be the “power” of language.
During the pandemic, English, as a worldwide “lingua franca”, was clearly used as one of the primary forms of communication by media, news and journals all over the world. Just to make an example: we may say that the English word “COVID-19”, is commonly known and understandable worldwide and we can also dare to say that is one of the most widely used denomination for the virus.
As for Chinese, which is itself an extremely lively language, the pandemic outbreak brought about many changes and lead to the creation of several neologisms (in a broad sense). Every year, a number of institutions draw up a top ten of the most frequently used world on the internet: “十大网络流行语” Shí dà wǎngluò liúxíng yǔ and these will be the focus of this research.
We will examine a random sample of english and chinese neologism largely widespread during 2020 so to understand, from a linguistical point of view, which are the changes brought up by the pandemic.
