Outbreak, surge or wave: how and what we say about the coronavirus

In the news language as a special media genre, changes in the lexical and semantic system of the language are very quickly manifested, reflecting the dynamics of social, political, and economic life. The research of news texts in critical eras is very relevant in terms of identifying trends in new vocabulary functioning. The pandemic is created a “pandemic” discourse in which new words are an important part of the lexical and semantic level of discourse. The study of neologisms in the active phase, at the very peak of functioning, allows us to comprehend the linguistic mechanism of new words formation, the external generation factor of which is extralinguistic reality. We establish that new words in the pandemic discourse appear in several ways: intralingual borrowing from highly specialized terminology (herd immunity, “cytokine storm”), foreign borrowing (coronavirus), as a result of metaphorization (wave, cover, crowned) and word-formation processes (corona, coronacrisis). Coronavirus is personified, it is presented as the evil of global and planet dimension, as a threat to humanity. We also reveal that the general emotional-expressive negativization of discourse determines the choice of native speakers from potentially possible extensions of the word semantics of meanings with negative evaluative connotations (crowned, burst). Semes of suddenness and intensity dominate in synonyms describing the coronavirus spread. The metaphor of wave contains a predictability component, which predicts the possibility of the next coronavirus wave, its timing, and the degree of danger to people. The enrichment of common words with highly specialized medical terms can be named as a specific tendency of the “pandemic” discourse.