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This chapter reconstructs the research work developed within the volume, with the aim of bringing out new elements. Using the abductive process within this chapter, therefore starting from the facts-understood as the infodemic disorder that afflicted public institutions and citizens during the first period of the Covid-19 pandemic-the evidence is presented. It is therefore a question of inserting the six research into the nested case study. Through the technique of lexical worlds, the views of the crisis have been reconstructed. The chapter also traces the limits of this study by opening new avenues for the analysis of the communication crisis produced by the pandemic. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023. All rights reserved.
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To alleviate the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on tourism, tourist facilities in Bali are informing visitors of the relevant health protocols, using posters to describe the appropriate behaviours. Using critical discourse analysis, this study examines the microstructure of the texts in these posters to identify their semantic, syntactic, lexical, and rhetorical elements. The study findings show that the semantic aspects consist of background, intention, and detail. The syntactic elements involve coherence and the use of the pronouns 'you' and 'we', and of the imperative, and the declarative. The lexical aspects include abbreviations and vocabulary, related to the health protocol. The textual messages are delivered in official language, supported by pictures and photographs.
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This article discusses lexical and semantic changes during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, we describe semantic shifts, new concepts, and neologisms associated with the COVID-19 pandemic based on the results of an associative survey. A total of 142 respondents voluntarily participated in our online survey. The term 'coronavirus' was taken as a stimulus word. Respondents had to answer what colour and number the word 'coronavirus' is associated with. The results of the study show that the stimulus 'coronavirus' in the minds of people activates the colours red, green, black, blue, yellow and very weakly causes associations with brown, white, gold, purple, colourless, as well as the frequency of the number 19. Additionally, according to the results of the study, it can be said that during the COVID-19 pandemic, negative meanings of colourative vocabulary were actualized (except green, because this colour began to symbolize safety), and numbers and some new concepts that have a nonpositive colouring appeared.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has shattered health and brought about economic and social havoc to many countries. Spain is one of the hardest affected European countries in both the number of sick or deceased people and the ongoing socioeconomic consequences. Experts think that the current COVID-19 disaster will change our perception of the world and human relationships and lead us to a new reality for which we are likely not fully prepared. The main aim of this paper is to observe, describe and analyze Spanish people's perception of the post-COVID-19 reality. In order to approach the sample's perception of the new reality, a thorough qualitative and quantitative analysis of the available lexicon produced by a sample of 220 university students is carried out. The lexical association tests used in the available lexicon research allow access to the shared prototypic categorization. In this paper we specifically intend to analyze the perception the informants have-after the first months in the context of the so-called ʼnew normality'-on the following centers of interest presented as stimuli: society, city, countryside and environment. We will work with a sample with variations in sex, age and place of confinement. The global results show that the most central words in the categories of city and countryside seem conflicting, providing a more positive vision in the first case. Regarding the comparisons between groups according to the pre-stratification variables, certain differences are perceived not so much at the quantitative level as at the qualitative level. It will serve to design intervention strategies from both educational and preventative-health and administrative fields to provide society with the necessary tools to face future crises and recover from the worst possible consequences of the current situation. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.
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The article is devoted to the description of the communicative behavior of the word istoria, which, as a result of the process of resemantization, is used in the "non-dictionary” meaning: ‘a thing/something' and widely functions in modern everyday Russian speech in various types of discourse. The study was carried out on the material of 3 sources: the oral subcorpus of the National Corpus of the Russian Language, the corpus of Russian everyday speech "One Speech Day” and separate recordings of the surrounding speech (from everyday conversations, interviews, lectures, etc.). The problem of the functioning of the bleached word istoria is considered in several aspects: the dependence of such usages on the type of discourse and the characteristics of the speaker (age, professional activity, level of speech competence — LSC), as well as the ability of the reseman-tized word istoria to characterize an idiolect. It turned out that the word istoria with "empty” semantics plays a role of a multifunctional tool serving various types of discourse in modern Russian speech, and its active use is a result of saving speech efforts and does not characterize any particular social group of speakers. Such use has the character of an individual speech trait: in some cases, the word istoria acquires a status of a "parasite word” and indicates a low LSC of a native speaker, and in other situations, it indicates the desire of a speaker with a high LSC to establish an easy communication style. © 2023, Russian Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
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This work is devoted to interactive methods of using the Russian social network VKontakte in the study of the first foreign language by students of technical universities of agro-industrial faculties. Currently, training is closely connected with modern Internet technologies and social networks. Social network is one of the forms of distance learning. In our article, we described an experiment conducted with the first-year full-time students of the Don State Technical University studying their first foreign language. The goal of our research was the identification and description of the most influencing forms and methods for the motivation of students in teaching the first foreign language. In the presented research work, we used the empirical method and the method of pedagogical research. We have explored a variety of social networks that are most often used by students, namely: Instagram, Odnoklassniki, Twitter, YouTube. We conducted an experiment and made an analysis of the obtained data. The material for our analysis was the social network VKontakte. We have created an open training group, in which students of the agro-industrial faculty of full-time education studying the first foreign language were signed. As a result of the inquest, we have identified the most relevant social network among first-year students. It has been established that Internet sources influence the interest and motivation of students in learning the first foreign language. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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The rapid development of high technology and the Internet has made online learning increasingly popular, especially in the last few years when the COVID-19 pandemic appeared and spread worldwide. However, implementing online English courses in the pre-COVID-19 period was not prevalent;and only a few courses utilized new technologies to teach the English language online in universities and colleges in Viet Nam (Pham, 2020). This paper investigates 270 Vietnamese tertiary students' digital competency and online English writing study and practice experience in pre-, during, and post-COVID-19 periods. It also examines the link between the lexical features and the quality of the students' online English writing. In addition, the study surveys English teachers' perceptions of lexical features' influence on the students' online English writing quality. The study found that Vietnamese tertiary students' digital competencies are of a high standard, with plentiful experiences of using digital technology in learning and practicing English. Some students faced challenges such as performing digital devices, communicating with friends and teachers, reading guides and documents in English, or having financial issues while taking online English courses during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, most of them solved all problems quickly and effectively themselves. Moreover, the findings implicated the strong influences of lexical sophistication, lexical diversity, and language accuracy on the students' English writing quality. Finally, it showed teachers' approval for students to use English writing aids when learning or practicing writing English online because of the educational benefits and convenience they could get in online English learning sessions. Practitioner Notes 1. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed English learning and teaching approaches in Viet Nam universities. 2. The tertiary students' digital competence and adaptability somewhat impact their online English learning and practicing process and results. 3. The common challenges Vietnamese EFL students used to deal with include performing digital devices, communicating in the online learning community for physical and spiritual support, reading digital guides in English, and financial issues when taking part in online English learning sessions. 4. The relationship between lexical features, including lexical diversity, lexical sophistication, lexical density, language accuracy, and cohesive devices and Vietnamese students' online English writing quality, need to be thoroughly examined and statistically analysed by group and time. 5. Tertiary English teachers' and EFL students' perspectives on the influences of using English writing assistant tools in students' online English writing quality should be referred to build up pedagogical principles in online English learning assessment. © 2023, University of Wollongong. All rights reserved.
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Now mostly known as "COVID-19" (or simply "Covid"), early discourse around the pandemic was characterized by a particularly large variation in naming choices (ranging from "new coronavirus" and "new respiratory disease" to "killer bug" and the racist term "Chinese virus"). The current study is situated within corpus-assisted discourse studies and analyses these naming choices in UK newspaper coverage (January-March 2020), focusing on terminology deemed "inappropriate" as per WHO guidelines on naming infectious diseases. The results show that 9% of all terms referring to COVID-19 or the virus causing it are "inappropriate" overall, with "inappropriate" naming being more prevalent (1) in tabloids than broadsheets and (2) in the period before compared to the period after the virus was officially named on 11th February, 2020. Selected examples within each of the categories of "inappropriate" names are explored in more detail [terms (1) inciting undue fear, (2) containing geographic locations, and (3) containing species of animals], and the findings are discussed with regard to the contribution of lexical choices to the reproduction of (racist and otherwise problematic) ideologies in mainstream media.
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The subject of the analysis are aggressive linguistic behaviours constituting a part of the pandemic discourse. We are interested in verbal aggression in a borderline situation, for which we consider the COVID-19 disease as the effect of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. The research material comes from the discussion forums of the Czech internet portal Novinky.cz. It was collected in the period from July 2021 to August 2022. The researched comments are an example of so-called written conversation, because they reflect the nature of spontaneous communication, the texts are unprepared, created with the usage of the language of everyday communication (běžná mluva), colloquialisms, slangisms, the obecná čeština, with a clear presence of expressive vocabulary. The article discusses manifestations of verbal aggression in a lexical-pragmatic perspective, while verbal aggression is understood as any deliberate linguistic behavior that causes harm to another person, inflicts psychological discomfort, presents them in a bad light, depreciates, mocks or ridicules them. The analysis focuses on such aggressive linguistic behaviour as threats, curses, insults, ridicule, accusations. © 2022 Polska Akademia Nauk. All rights reserved.
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Social media use spiked amid the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in an increase in fake news proliferation, especially health misinformation. Many misinformation detection studies have primarily focused on English texts, and of these, very few have examined linguistic features (syntactic, lexical, and semantic). Lexical features such as number of upper-case letters have been shown to improve misinformation detection in English and non-English texts, however, use of lexical features is still in its infancy, and thus warrants further investigation. Therefore, a novel lexical-based health misinformation detection model is proposed using machine learning techniques, specifically focusing on two languages, namely, English, and standard Malay. A new dataset containing fake and real news were developed from a fact- checking portal and local media, targeting news related to COVID-19. Common natural language processing tasks including filtering, tokenization, stemming etc. and lexical feature extraction were administered prior to data modelling. Evaluation on a dataset containing 1060 fake and real news each show Random Forest to yield the best performance with 99.6% for F-measure and accuracy of 96%, followed closely by Support Vector Machine. A similar observation was noted for the Malay corpus. Improved health misinformation detection was observed when linguistic features were included as part of the model, hence implying that the features can be successfully used in detecting fake news. © 2022 IEEE.
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Health literacy is the ability of a person to read and understand medical text and to use that information to make informed healthcare decisions. Unfortunately, medical articles are difficult to comprehend by common people as they use complex language and domain-specific terms. Improving health literacy is important for empowering communities against emerging threats and the COVID-19 pandemic bears testimony to this statement. One way to improve health literacy is easing access to complex healthcare information by summarising medical texts and simplifying them lexically by translating specific medical terminology to laymen's terms. In this paper we propose a system that performs extractive summarization on the medical article given as input followed by named entity recognition for identifying medical terms. The meanings of identified medical entities are then found through web scraping and displayed to the user along with the summary. We have experimented with state-of-the-art summarization models and Albert (A lite BERT) has provided the best ROUGE-1 score of 0.3789 and ROUGE-L of 0.2084. © 2022 IEEE.
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This work was carried out within the framework of medialinguistics (the term of T.G. Dobroklonskaya) – an actively developing area of linguistics that studies the functioning of the language in mass communication [1]. Media text belongs to the newspaper-journalistic style, which carries out a two-pronged task: informative and influential. At the same time, according to the universal recognition of sociologists and linguists, the impact on the consciousness of the public through semantic and evaluation information prevails, gradually displacing the function of information. The newspaper and magazine variety has become the most widespread within the framework of the journalistic style, since the main goals of the information text are clearly traced here: to inform the addressee about any fact that is socially significant;explicitly express its attitude towards it and arouse a certain attitude of the addressee [2], [3]. It is these facts that dictate the choice of the object of study in this work – a newspaper headline, as a special variety of media texts, which contains information about the most popular and current situation related to the Covid-19 virus today. In this perspective, the extent of the influence of newspaper headlines on the formation of public opinion in Spain and Russia is analyzed. The article considers the headlines of Spanish ("El País” and "El Mundo”) and Russian ("Izvestia” and "Kommersant”) newspapers devoted to the topic of Covid-19, in terms of their functional workload, namely, the explicit or hidden introduction into the consciousness of readers of subjective interpretation of information instead of objective presentation of facts. The results of the study show that communicative tactics of prevention, intimidation and attraction are recruited in the headlines of the Spanish and Russian press through lexical means of language. Research material and theoretical conclusions can be used in the preparation of Spanish language courses [4]. © 2022 BiLD Law Journal. All rights reserved.
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Introduction: One of the negative consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic may be an increase in somatization. Objective(s): identification of implicit characteristics of texts indicating the peculiarities of the opinion about the pandemic by people with high somatization level. Method(s): Survey (03/23/2020-01/29/2021, N=1188). Used: SCL-90-R, COPE, Constructive Thinking Inventory (CTI). It was offered to express an opinion on the pandemic. The statements were divided into the two text arrays - "high somatization" and "low somatization" (based on the parameter "somatization" SCL-90R). The frequency of words in these text arrays was estimated (LIWC). Result(s): The analysis showed an increase in somatization as the pandemic developed (Std.J-T Statistic=4,327). The relationship between somatization and anxiety, sleep disturbances, and depression was revealed. Higher rates of somatization are associated with a decrease in emotional coping, global constructive thinking and personal superstitious thinking, an increase in categorical thinking. The connection between somatization and a number of nonconstructive copings is shown. Texts associated with high somatization demonstrate higher number of pronouns of the first person (30.77%, 17.19%), a decrease in the tonality of words, a vocabulary (LIWC) of suffering, negative sthenic emotions (1,53%, 0,93%), a decrease in the vocabulary of motivation and resistance (0,93%, 1,49%), a decrease in vocabulary associated with the body (0,20%, 0,32%). Conclusion(s): The connection between somatization and high emotional distress, which manifests itself in negative emotional vocabulary and is associated with a low level of emotional coping, is shown. The "representation" of the pandemic, presented in the text, is "divorced" from somatic manifestations, fear of illness and death.
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New terminologies of Covid-19 in the Indonesian language began to appear during the pandemic. Generally, English affects the articulation of many terms in Indonesian when no equivalent words exist, leading to the borrowing process. The spread of new terms is inseparable from the influence of technological advances. Hence, the data used were obtained from a trusted national online media site antvklik.com, and qualitative methods were used to examine Indonesian terms that existed during the Covid-19 pandemic. This research concluded that the borrowed term can be classified into five forms, namely words, phrases, synonyms, abbreviations, and acronyms. Some terminologies are adjusted to enhance acceptance in society, while others are used directly. © 2022 ACADEMY PUBLICATION.
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OBJECTIVES: Protective facial coverings (PFCs) such as surgical masks attenuate speech transmission and affect speech intelligibility, which is reported in languages such as English and German. The present study intended to verify the detrimental impacts on production of tonal languages such as Cantonese, by examining realization of speech correlates in Cantonese under PFCs including facial masks and shields. METHODS: We recorded scripted speech in Hong Kong Cantonese produced by three adult speakers who wore various PFCs, including surgical masks, KF94 masks, and face shields (with and without surgical masks). Spectral and temporal parameters were measured, including mean intensity, speaking rate, long-term amplitude spectrum, formant frequencies of vowels, and duration and fundamental frequency (F0) of tone-bearing parts. RESULTS: Significant changes were observed in all acoustic correlates of Cantonese speech under PFCs. Sound pressure levels were attenuated more intensely at ranges of higher frequencies in speech through face masks, whereas sound transmission was affected more at ranges of lower frequencies in speech under face shields. Vowel spaces derived from formant frequencies shrank under all PFCs, with the vowel /aa/ demonstrating largest changes in the first two formants. All tone-bearing parts were shortened and showed increments of F0 means in speech through PFCs. The decrease of tone duration was statistically significant in High-level and Low-level tones, while the increment of F0 means was significant in High-level tone only. CONCLUSIONS: General filtering effect of PFCs is observed in Cantonese speech data, confirming language-universal patterns in acoustic attenuation by PFCs. The various coverings lower overall intensity levels of speech and degrade speech signal in higher frequency regions. Modification patterns specific to Hong Kong Cantonese are also identified. Vowel space area is reduced and found associated with increased speaking rates. Tones are produced with higher F0s under PFCs, which may be attributed to vocal tension caused by tightened vocal tract during speaking through facial coverings.
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The most dangerous and infectious disease, COVID-19, affecting millions of people is by an enveloped RNA virus known as SARS-COV-2 or Coronavirus, and the disease is unknown before the epidemic commenced in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. Many researchers are busy finding the vaccine for the pandemic. Here, we analyze the diagnostic methods by using mathematical modeling. The majority probable corona patient category with an enhanced AUC characterizes the SVM’s optimal diagnostics model in this chapter. Experimental and computational analyses demonstrate that the diagnosis of potentially COVID-19 can be supported by adopting ML algorithms that learn linguistic diagnostics from the interpretation of elderly persons. Highlight the collection of significant semantic, lexical, and top n-gram properties with the better ML method to estimate diseases. But diagnostics methods must be trained on massive datasets, leading to improved AUC and medical diagnoses of COVID-19 probability. A significant use resulting from mathematical modeling is that it claims transparency and accurateness about our model. These techniques can help in decision-making by useful predictions about substantial issues such as treatment protocols and interfere and minimize the spread of COVID-19. © 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Misinformation is always a serious problem for the general public, especially during pandemic. People constantly receive text messages of related coronavirus news and its cures from their smartphones. These health text messages help people update their coronavirus knowledge repeatedly and better manage their health, but some of the messages may mislead people and may even cause a fatal result. This research tries to identify mobile health text misinformation by proposing a self-reconfigurable system, which includes the preprocessing functions (involving lexical analysis, stopword removal, and stemming), a dataflow graph from TensorFlow, and a reconfiguration method for self-improvement. Experiment results show the proposed method significantly improves the accuracy of the mobile health text misinformation detection compared to the one without using self-reconfiguration. However, the results also show the accuracy still has room for improvement. More refinements need to be done before the method could be put into an effective use. © 2022 IEEE.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has altered our routines, our conversations, the specific social contexts in which we hear or use certain words, and potentially, the representation of the words related to the disease and its consequences. Here we investigated whether the effects of the pandemic have changed the representation of the affective features of COVID-19-related words. To this aim, we collected new ratings of valence (from unpleasant to pleasant) and arousal (from calm to activated) dimensions for COVID-19-related words (e.g., hospital) and COVID-19-unrelated words (e.g., whale). Subsequently, we compared these scores with those from databases that reported ratings for the same pool of words before the pandemic. Our results showed significant changes in arousal for COVID-19-related words but not unrelated words, thus revealing that the pandemic social context modified their affective representation. These findings support the flexibility of emotional representations and the malleability and dynamicity of the mental lexicon as a function of contextual factors.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 , Language , Emotions , Humans , Pandemics , Social EnvironmentABSTRACT
Lexical features are influenced by different languages and genres. The study of lexical features in different genres of texts on the same topic is helpful to understand the universalities and peculiarities of languages. This study constructs a research on the lexical feature and word collocations of two self-build corpora (China's economic Legal Policy Corpus and English News Corpus during the COVID-19 pandemic), the methods of Quantitative Linguistics and context interpretation are adopted. It was found that: (1) the word length, word frequency, word cluster and high frequency word distribution in English economic news and Chinese economic legal policies are influenced by language and genre to some extent, and they conform to different functional image distribution; (2) during the COVID-19 pandemic, "development" has been the focus of China's economic legal policies and English news, the two have attached importance to economic recovery and taken a positive attitude toward it in different ways. These findings suggest that: (1) There are some universalities and peculiarities between English economic news and Chinese economic legal policies in the distribution of lexical feature; (2) there is a certain synchronization between laws and news, and both of them maintain a positive and objective attitude toward the economic development during the pandemic. This study carries out a macroscopic investigation on internal structure and external interpretation, which enriches the study on lexical features and cultural features of language and provides some references for relevant studies.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 , COVID-19/epidemiology , Disease Outbreaks , Humans , Linguistics , Pandemics , PolicyABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken every area of society, and language (most especially its vocabulary), as a mirror to the world we live in, clearly reflects the deep mark it has left. What is more, this is the first great pandemic of the online era, which helps explain the huge influence this health emergency has had on lexical creativity since, thanks to social media networks, events have been narrated in real time for the very first time. This article seeks to study and characterise the lexical creativity of the Catalan language associated with COVID-19, based on an analysis of lexical neologisms related with this emergency situation and appearing during the pandemic. To achieve this, we have created two corpuses of neologisms - one terminology-related and another dealing with general language - and have analysed them linguistically and compared them. This process has helped us to provide a highly accurate portrayal of the lexical innovation in the Catalan language during this pandemic