In a 2016 article published in this journal (Roig–Marín, 2016), I argued that the coinage of cyber-blends reflects our blended digital/physical relationships in today's world. The current pandemic has put a halt to our everyday lives and all forms of physical contact, and so technologies and digital experiences now play a more conspicuous role than ever. We have gone online and got used to vocabulary whose usage prior to COVID-19 was very limited (e.g. quarantine and pandemic) or known to very few (coronavirus, super-spreader, or the abbreviations PPE ‘personal protective equipment’ or WFH ‘working from home’), while coming to terms with the implications of others such as self-isolation, lockdown, or social distancing (which should be better called physical distancing as social closeness, albeit non-physically, is very much needed to get through these difficult times). Short pieces on coroneologisms have attested to the rise of many new lexical formations, mostly blends. According to Thorne (2020; also cited in CBC, 2020), more than 1,000 new words – both non-specialised and technical terminology – have been created during the current pandemic. Journalists and Twitter users are particularly prone to coin words displaying a high level of linguistic ingenuity; yet, the circulation of that lexis may be very limited. The present note overviews some of the most widely spread vocabulary related to our new COVID-19 reality, coming from the laity rather than from medical or scientific professionals. Alongside terms like social distancing and lockdown, less technical and more playful vocabulary has transcended linguistic boundaries. Particular attention will be paid to examples from European languages whose word-stocks share a common Latinate substratum, likewise central to scientific communication.
This article focuses on English coroneologisms coined during the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to contextualise two of the main morphological mechanisms underlying the coinage of coroneologisms in non-specialised terminology, namely blending and compounding, I will discuss the whole spectrum of lexical items traditionally ascribed to these word-formation processes and their relation to other lexicogenetic mechanisms. The rapid shift in the status of the word corona from having its primary sense, "crown", in Romance languages prior to the pandemic, to being automatically perceived as a clipping of coronavirus in Romance and Germanic languages alike is illustrated, as well as the high frequency of COVID, among other base forms, in the coinage of numerous words in a matter of months. References will be made to the use of these neologisms in English and their adoption and adaptation into other languages.
This article concentrates on the competing forces underlying the use of the English morpheme -er in Spanish. Despite some asymmetries concerning the semantics of this morpheme in Spanish and English, I argue that we are witnessing one of the earliest instances of morphological borrowing in Spanish: -er has achieved a unique status in peninsular Spanish in so far as speakers have started to use it productively to mean “an avid fan of X”. In order to support my argument, I provide empirical evidence and place this phenomenon within the framework of both contact language studies and fandom studies, particularly online fandom communities, the forerunners of this linguistic innovation in fields such as music, politics, or TV shows.
This article provides an overview of the Romance-Latin continuum, inherent to the Durham Account Rolls (DAR), and contextualises the learning and teaching of French and Latin in medieval England: an understanding of the socio-historical context and the underlying pedagogical framework enables us to better assess the data presented in this article. In line with a detriment to the learning of French in the late 14th century and a progressive loss of linguistic competence, the definite article in these multilingual texts started to develop an independent course from its French model which is herein discussed. The parameters for identifying lexis as coming only from French, Latin, or both are also revisited. The occurrences in the DAR usually encompass a whole spectrum of possible morphological manifestations ranging from Latin to French. This article concludes with some notes on the main semantic domains to which Anglo-French contributed in the DAR.
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