CORONA LEXICON: NEOLOGISMS OR OCCASIONALISMS?

Abstract

The coronavirus pandemic is directly reflected in the German language and especially its vocabulary. The needs for communications and nomination of new concepts are fulfilled through the emergence of new words which expand and renovate the vocabulary. Multiple criteria for neologism detection are presented in the paper. The study uses an entirely digital corpus. The extracted neologisms were registered, described, and classified according to their structure. Considering that compounding is a conventional word formation process, it was suggested that hybrids would be the most productive type of neologisms. The possibilities of enriching the language through corona-related words were discussed.