TENDINŢE ŞI PROCESE LEXICO-SEMANTICE ÎN TERMINOLOGIA ROMÂNEASCĂ PANDEMICĂ
LEXICO-SEMANTIC TRENDS AND PROCESSES IN THE ROMANIAN TERMINOLOGY OF THE PANDEMIC

Author(s): Katalin Nagy Imola
Subject(s): Lexis, Semantics
Published by: Scientia Kiadó
Keywords: COVID-19; terminology; lexico-semantic processes; Romanian language; borrowing; calque;
Summary/Abstract: The COVID-19 epidemic is, from a linguistic point of view, a new referent that has led to the emergence of new concepts and lexemes. Our study analyses the lexicalization processes and semantic changes generated by the COVID-19 epidemic within the Romanian language, based on a corpus built from the material published on official governmental websites online as well as from the lexical content of dictionaries dedicated to the terms generated by the pandemic, which can be found on the Internet and which aim to clarify the meaning of some terms. We do not want to make a quantitative analysis, as the corpus is still under construction, just as the pandemic is still evolving. We analyse the changes and the most notable lexical and semantic phenomena that manifest themselves in this Romanian COVID vocabulary, including terminologization, compounding, conversion, etc. These varied techniques of word formation that favoured the processes of lexicalization and the creation of neologisms reveal an impressive linguistic dynamic at the level of the Romanian public discourse related to pandemics, which, however, is modelled on similar processes occurring in the English language, from which the Romanian pandemic terminology has taken over quite a lot, through borrowing and calque.

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