Romanians’ lexical creation under COVID-19 times

Abstract

This paper investigates Romanian lexical innovations that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the sociolinguistic approach is tangentially present, the main objective is to describe the lexico-semantic mechanisms of the analysed language facts. The methodology used required the tools of semantic, lexical-paradigmatic, and stylistic analysis. The sources of the corpus are: online press, news on local TV channels, social networks, and some oral attestations. The results of the research are a contribution to the inventory of the pandemic lexicon in the current Romanian language and to the analysis and framing of these facts of language in the broader typology of lexical creations, regardless of whether they are ephemeral or whether some of them will find their permanent place in the language.