Pandemic and Linguistic Contamination in News Reporting: Social and Communicative Aspects

Abstract

The spread of Coronavirus has contaminated people’s vocabulary. The first part of my work aims to analyse the new expressions used in British news reporting. The discussion will thereafter center on the employment of neologisms and new phrases in less formal contexts. I will accordingly dwell on the relationship between the formal and informal registers of the Coronavirus-related vocabulary by taking into account Foucault’s (1972: 96-105) theory of repeatable materiality, and Johnstone’s (2008: 133-34) theory of indexicality. Finally, I will look into some Coronavirus-related medical lexicon (Thorne 2020).

The second part will concentrate on the social aspects of the pandemic on a global scale. It will investigate the concept of space and distance by considering Lotman and Uspenskij’s (1975: 155-65) space theories. This discussion will go on to highlight the social inequalities brought about by the pandemic (Tsuda 2013: 445-56), and to ultimately point out how social changes have generated a space-cultural entropy (Shannon 1948: 381-82) and, therefore, social and linguistic chaos.