A SPECIALIZED CORPUS STUDY OF LEXEME FORMATION IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Abstract

Lexicology is a linguistic science that focuses on the theories of morphology and lexeme formations and linguistic components such as lexemes, phrases, and terminologies. COVID-19 emerged as a global catastrophe encompassing every sphere of life and has had a profound effect on language by giving birth to hundreds of new terms. The present study aims to investigate the lexemes used in the DAWN newspaper during the Covid-19 pandemic. Lieber’s model of morphological analysis has been adopted to reach the conclusions. Text for morphological analysis is selected from the Coronavirus section of Dawn e-newspaper carrying the information related to the Covid epidemic, its spread, prevention, and cure, during the time tenure of Sep 2019 to January 2022, hence making it two years long corpus of COVID-19 data covering first, second, third and fourth waves of the epidemic. The research corpus was further converted into Machine readable format to process it further in Antconc 3.5.8 software. A total of 82 new lexemes were collected manually from 106 selected articles whose frequencies were studied in Antconc 3.5.8. Mixed method research was used to achieve the quantitative and qualitative results. Results demonstrate that four prominent main methods, affixation, compounding, blending, and initials/ acronyms are frequently involved in developing lexical linkages and morphological unities in the coinage of coronavirus lexemes during COVID-19.