VAX AS A NEW STAGE IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF COVID-NEOLOGISMS

Abstract

The article considers the peculiarities of the development and transformations of COVID-related
neologisms in modern media discourse and lexicographic sources. Media discourse is particularly
favourable to innovations and serves as a “proving ground” for testing the accuracy and vitality of
COVID-related neologisms, from which the most successful examples of linguo-creative practice enter
dictionaries. The author investigates the ranking of key words in lexicographic sources of recent years,
analyzes the extralinguistic preconditions for changing COVID-related vocabulary to vaccine-related
vocabulary. The latter represents the second wave in the development of COVID-related neologisms with
the central lexeme vax which is described as the semantic innovation, shortened from the words vaccine,
vaccination or vaccinate. The research systematizes key trends among COVID-related neologisms, in
particular: active functioning of shortenings with high derivational and expressive potential, dominance
of suffixal and prefixal ways of word formation, compounding and shortenings, prevalence of ironic
nominations as a method of psychological self-defense, and of hypernymic nominations (COVID)
over hyponymic ones (Delta, Omicron) in discourse, differentiation between different disease states
depending on the duration and complexity of its consequences (long COVID and covidcito). Besides, the
metaphorical nature of human thinking determines the desire of a person to describe the disease through
the prism of conceptual metaphors. The most frequent conceptual metaphor in our sample turned out to be
PANDEMIC IS A WAR, which demonstrates the global and catastrophic consequences of the pandemic
due to its correlation with such a domain as war.