Morphosyntactic Analysis of COVID-19-related English Expressions

Abstract

Language as a dynamic social artifact with the potential to change captures and encodes the changing realities of life both in time and space. The COVID-19 pandemic, a phenomenal reality whose sudden outbreak affected humanity gravely, triggered off changes in how things were done in all aspects of life prior to its outbreak. This resulted in the upsurge of new words, phrases, and expressions in languages, of which English is one. This paper examines the morpho-syntactic nature of the new words, phrases, and sentences that emerged in English in the wake of the pandemic. It identifies and analyses the word-formation processes and the morphemic components of the words and the syntactic constituents of phrases and sentences. A corpus of 199 COVID-19-related expressions collected purposively from different sources is analysed. The theoretical framework of this study is Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar and Rets Structural theory of neologism. The analysis revealed the different word-formation processes. It showed how nouns, verbs, and adjectives were formed with compounding and blending being the most common process. Noun phrases and verb phrases were most frequently used while the imperative was the most frequent. The study revealed the creativity and vitality of English morphological and syntactical processes in response to the changes in people’s routines and habits as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper concluded that the morphological and syntactic processes demonstrate how speakers of English deploy the finite set of rules and elements of the language in new and creative ways to describe and speak about novel situations.