Corona-Komposita und ‚Corona‘-Konzepte in der Medienberichterstattung in Standardsprache und in Leichter Sprache

Abstract First linguistic studies have paid attention to the influence of the current corona pandemic on language use in the German media coverage. They have revealed, amongst other things, that compounds beginning with corona are very productive and frequent. Against this background, the questions arise how frequent these compounds de facto are, what their morphological and graphematic characteristics look like, which second constituents can be observed, which semantic relations between the constituents exist and what their referents are. However, not only people being able to read texts in standard language need information concerning the pandemic; individuals lacking this capacity also need to know which rules apply to public life and social interaction. Therefore, information on the corona pandemic is also available in German Easy Language. But translators are faced with several dilemmas regarding the translation of compounds into Easy Language. It is thus an open question whether compounds beginning with corona, recently observed in the media coverage in standard language, also occur in the media coverage in Easy Language and, if present, what their characteristics are in comparison to the relevant compounds in standard language. An additional question is how the referents of compounds beginning with corona in standard language are designated in Easy Language in those cases where no comparable compound beginning with corona is used for this purpose. The present study uses a corpus linguistic approach to address these questions.