LINGUISTIC FEATURES OF COVID-19 PHENOMENON WITHIN SOCIAL NETWORKS

Abstract

The paper focuses on neologisms and medical terms related to COVID-19, which affects almost all elements of life, including social and linguistic spheres. Evidently, the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the speech and communication behavior of people in society. This has resulted in the introduction of novel terminology, including specialized language and abbreviations, that allow individuals to articulate their emotions and ideas. These terms have gained significant popularity on social media platforms and are now commonplace in online communication, indicating that the community has embraced these new words and is actively incorporating them into their vocabulary in response to the pandemic. The emergence of new words during COVID-19 is one of the phenomena of language change. New words formed during COVID-19 have been presented in this article. Their meaning and the impact they have on a person's social life have been explored. Discourse analysis using the descriptive qualitative research approach has been applied in this research. The new English terms have been singled out from posts and news articles related to COVID on social networks Twitter and Facebook. It has been found that the semantic features of each term related to COVID-19 can provide a clear description of the general meaning of each word. In addition, semantic features have been used to find similar terms in meaning that have been grouped into one semantic field, while distinguishing the meaning of one term from another in the same semantic field.