Adapting to the pandemic crisis through the lens of language. On the English semantic neologism lockdown and its adoption into Czech

Abstract

The influx of neologisms associated with the coronavirus pandemic demonstrates the natural need to expand the lexicon with new words when the language community is confronted with a new reality. Neological adoptions (the word lockdown in Czech) and semantic neologisms (the extension of the English word lockdown with a new meaning) thus directly reflect the adaptation to a new reality at the linguistic level. In my article relying primarily on empirical data from monitoring corpora of Czech and English, I focus mainly on the process of adapting the individual loanword into the Czech lexical system, successively on the conceptual, formal, morphological, word-forming, and syntactic level. The unproblematic integration of the word into the Czech environment, crowned by its inclusion in the emerging monolingual dictionary of Czech, may also testify to the state of the Czech language in today's global world.