Lockdown vs. Shutdown: Zur Semantik der partiellen Synonyme im Deutschen
Lockdown vs. Shutdown: On the semantics of the partial synonyms in German

Summary/Abstract: The paper presents a lexical and semantic analysis of two anglicisms in German: lockdown and shutdown. Due to the corona pandemic a substantial increase in their frequency has been observed. To reflect this phenomenon, we used the corpus-building tool in Sketch Engine to create a web corpus by entering a set of seed words related to the emergency measures taken during the ongoing pandemic. The frequency analysis showed that the relative frequency of lockdown in German was approximately three times higher than that of shutdown. When comparing the definitions of both nouns in English and German dictionaries, we observed that shutdown is often defined as a synonym of lockdown, which is not quite the case in English. Thus, a certain shift towards polysemy can be observed in German. In order to compare the use of both nouns in German, we extracted and compared compound nouns where lockdown and shutdown occur as primary words and as determiners. Furthermore, the analysis of idioms consisting of the nouns lockdown and shutdown yielded similar results. The compound nouns and idioms, with both lockdown and shutdown in German, were related to temporal aspects, geographical aspects, or aspects of the intensity of the safety measures.

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