COVID-19 AS A LINGUISTIC PHENOMENON (BASED ON THE TEXTS OF ENGLISH-LANGUAGE MEDIA AND SOCIAL NETWORKS)

Abstract

The article is dedicated to a topical problem of changing the semantic structure of a word over time and certain circumstances, sources of its emergence and spread. This problem has been little studied and requires further research due to the dynamism of the language itself. Characteristic features of semantic changes in the English lexicon in 2020-2021, associated with the current global crisis – Covid-19 pandemic – are highlighted and described. The authors give a general characteristic of the notion of semantic change and take neologisms as the basis of their study. The main content of the study is the analysis of neologisms based on the materials of the English-language media and social networks, as well as checking their presence in modern online dictionaries. As a research task, the authors have defined an attempt to focus the work on the disclosure of the concept of semantic change, its description and their consideration in the materials of the media and the Internet. The whole work is to explore this problem and make a theoretical contribution to neology. Such a study will be of interest to specialists in the field of neology who study the Covid-19 phenomenon.