남길임 외, 「The emergence and spread of Korean COVID-19 neologisms in news articles and user comments and their lexicographic description」, Lexicographica : series maior 163, 2022.12.19.

Introduction

    COVID-19-related new words have been coined extensively since December 2019, reflecting linguistic response to a social reality and indicating the dynamics of new words to cope with unprecedented pandemic situations. From an internal linguistic perspective, COVID-19 neologisms are first of all a set of new words which are focused on a specific period and a specific topic and show particular tendencies in terms of grammar and semantics. Not only do they hold great interest in wordformation research, but they also shed light on the relationship between language and discourse communities as they reveal the impact of the pandemic and its perceptions by the public. 

    There has been much discussion on vocabulary reflecting social and cultural phenomena in relation to lexicographic research. A few decades ago, Williams (1976) published a dictionary of cultural keywords, leading to the development of the ‘Keywords Project’, 1 which studies diachronic changes of meaning and synchronic meanings of major words. As for Wierzbicka (1999), vocabulary is key to understanding history, culture and society and keywords are evidence that lexicology and lexicography play a central role in interpreting discourse communities.

    Positing that the COVID-19 neologisms as a class of vocabulary constitute the keywords of the COVID-19 era, this study aims to analyze the occurrence and usage of such keywords and provide suggestions for their lexicographic representation, from the perspective of corpus linguistics. While research on the sociolinguistics of neologisms or the correlation between culture and neology has focused hitherto on particular types of neologisms and sociocultural phenomena, the use patterns of neologisms depending on genres and registers has not been fully discussed. However, the proliferation of Web languages and the dynamics of language resulting from mass communication call for the study of neologisms in relation to genres and registers. Thus, this study investigates the neologisms extracted not only from online news articles but also from the comments accompanying such articles. Comments written by non-experts are indeed equally crucial to examine as the articles written by experts since their respective values for analysis differ in terms of production and use of neologisms. 

    The present paper examines the usage of 341 COVID-19 neologisms which appeared in South Korea over a span of eighteen months (from December 2019 to May 2021) and were extracted from a corpus composed of COVID-19-related news articles and comments, the COVID-19 Corpus, in order to address the following research questions: 1) How do the 341 COVID-19 neologisms extracted rank in news articles and comments respectively?, 2) What usage trends do neologisms designating the disease and other high-frequency neologisms show in news articles and comments respectively?, 3) What characteristic differences do comments as a non-expert and subjective language resource and news articles as an expert and objective language resource show and what value may each genre add to the lexicographic description of neologisms? 

    The following section introduces the composition of the COVID-19 Corpus and research methodology. Section 3 provides a quantitative analysis of the COVID-19 neologisms and Section 4 is a case study of the usage trends of the high-frequency neologism K-pangyek3 ‘K-quarantine’. Finally, Section 5 discusses a number of issues regarding the lexicographic description of such neologisms as K-pangyek.