Among the linguistic consequences of the current pandemic, we focus on the usage of the lexeme Covid(-19) in Italian, both in the language of the daily press and in institutional/technical language. More specifically, we analyze the range of its polysemy and the role of metonymy in the semantic shifts that have produced it. The salience of the highly infectious pathogen, which also prompted its metaphorical reconceptualization, triggered the first extension of the term, originally denoting the disease, to predominantly denote the virus that causes it. This has also resulted in an almost complete shift of grammatical gender from feminine to masculine. Beside the primary metonymic shift, Covid(-19) developed a variety of further meanings which highlight different components of the emerging covid frame. The linguistic data are drawn from La Repubblica, a daily general-interest newspaper, and from a selection of texts by major governmental and health institutions.
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Among the linguistic outcomes of the pandemic are the discourse strategies applied by speakers belonging to different sociolinguistic groups in different communicative contexts. In particular, the study highlights the widespread use in Italian of a densely figurative language, aimed at representing in an effective and cognitively manageable way the dramatic novelty of the phenomenon and the exceptionality of proposed measures (typically, on the part of institutions, politicians and the press), and at expressing the unique and emotionally charged nature of the new experience (typically, on the part of the ordinary speaker). Among different possible source domains, the study focuses on that of the journey, which appears to have been overlooked in the literature, though it constitutes, crosslinguistically, a fundamental resource for the representation of several aspects of human experience.
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By adopting a synchronic/diachronic perspective, the study addresses the role of metonymy in the representation of numerical quantity. This can be observed in: (a) the motivation relating individual numeral forms, as well as the internal organization of the whole numeral sequence, to non-numeric entities involved in actual quantifying procedures; (b) the phenomenon by which certain salient numerosities function as reference points (Langacker, 1993) for other numerical representations within the functional/conceptual domain (Barcelona, 2011) of numerical quantity. First, a metonymic interpretation of a small group of numerals from different linguistic areas is proposed. Subsequently, the study focuses on a class of collective numerals in contemporary standard Italian that are derived from cardinals by means of affixation with -ino. The analysis of these word formations is aimed at demonstrating that metonymic mapping is a prerequisite for derivation, and that the mapping is based on privileged conceptual/pragmatic functions within the domain ofnumerosity.
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