Coronavirus (-Pandemie) in Sprache und Denken. Ein Exkurs anhand der deutschen online-Nachrichtenmeldungen
Coronavirus (Pandemic) in Language and Thought. Remarks Based on the German Online News Reports

Summary/Abstract: The Corona pandemic has dominated our lives for more than a year, profoundly affecting almost every facet of public as well as private life. The Corona crisis does not leave language untouched either, making it an extraordinarily broad, diverse and multidisciplinary field of research. Inspired by the current discussion on the corona pandemic, this article aims to make a linguistically oriented contribution to coronavirus investigation. The aim of the article is to show that corona language provides an efficient picture of the reality of life in pandemic times and at the same time helps to shape this reality. To this end, German-language online news reports from the period between mid-February 2019 and early November 2020 will be analysed with regard to the specific Corona lexis. First, the analysis focuses on the newly formed compound nouns. In the next step of the analysis, the corona vocabulary borrowed from English and the specialist terminology will be discussed. Selected occasional contaminations will also be examined. Furthermore, it is intended to address the connection between human mind and language by determining the cognitive image of coronavirus (pandemic) by means of the conceptual metaphors in the sense of Lakoff/Johnson (2014). Conceptual metaphors structure human thought and action and must be considered as an important means of knowing the world. The conceptual structure of coronavirus is reflected in the metaphorical expressions excerpted from online reports. The diversity of coronavirus metaphors reveals the complexity of the semantic structure of coronavirus. The research on corona language provides evidence that language as a living organism responds to the deep crises and (co-)creates the new corona world.

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