Linguistic creativity in the coronavirus era: the pragmatic potential of “vaccinologisms” in German-language media

The article is devoted to the analysis of neologisms of the thematic field “vaccination” as a result of linguistic creativity based on articles on vaccination against COVID-19 in modern German-language media discourse. The pandemic and subsequent vaccinations were the source of a large number of neologisms. News articles about vaccination were selected as the research material from newspapers in Austria, Germany and Switzerland during 2021–2023. 162 neologisms about vaccination against COVID-19 were selected using a continuous sampling method. 6454 fragments from German-language newspapers were analyzed. The article substantiates the introduction of the concept of “vaccinologism”, which means lexical units nominating vaccination against COVID-19, into scientific circulation. The article proposes a classification of linguocreative vaccinologisms, which include neologisms with the *impf* component formed according to one of the models: the “noun + noun” model; the model of hybrid compounding “*impf* + borrowing”; contamination; metaphorization. It was determined that vaccinologisms perform a number of functions: linguistic; expressive; motivating; compressive-informative. The method of semantic analysis revealed the actual meanings of neologisms about vaccination. The article describes the functioning of vaccinologisms in various types of discourses (political, medical, valeological, media-related). The use of vaccinologisms in media discourse was demonstrated, which has become a source for the linguistic creativity of communicants. It was established that the structure of the German language has significant resources for the formation of vaccinologisms. The pragmatic potential of neologisms was revealed using contextual analysis.