Ideological Clash of Media-Resonant Words: Corpus-Assisted Analysis of the Nominations «Coronavirus» and «Chinese Virus» in English-Language Media

Authors:
Chernyavskaya V.E.Pavlova E.A.
Abstract:

This paper traces the semantic competition between the lexemes «coronavirus» and «Chinese virus» used as nominations of the COVID-19 global pandemic of 2019−2023 and the formation of their ideological polysemy in English-language public discourse. The study was guided by the research question of how the use of competing nominations forms evaluative associations and indexical links with socio-political contexts. The research was conducted as a corpus-assisted analysis based on the texts of English-language publications integrated into the «All the News» corpus. Data retrieval: articles starting from December 2019 (the time of the first official reports about the pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan) were extracted from the general data set. The first publications with the «coronavirus» nomination in the dataset date back to January 6, 2020, and those with the «Chinese virus» nomination date back to January 17, 2020. The procedure used included the following analytical steps: the evaluative profiles of the nominations were compared, frequency analysis, collocation analysis using the LogDice measure, and sentiment analysis were conducted. The study argues that the nomination «coronavirus» demonstrates a predominantly neutral or mixed evaluative profile associated with the representation of factual aspects of the pandemic. The nomination «Chinese virus» is characterized by a negative evaluation and polemical marking. This is formed by evaluative judgments about the choice of the nomination and the socio-political consequences of its use. In the nomination «coronavirus», the negative connotation is mainly due to the description of the crisis caused by the pandemic. The analysis clarifies the mechanism of forming the indexical meaning of «Chinese virus» based on its connection to the socio-political context, in which the use of this nomination is consistently associated with negative evaluations and negative semantic associations of ethnic prejudice and political conflict.

Key words:
coronavirusChinese virusevaluationsocial indexicalitycorpus-assisted analysis“All the News” corpus
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