Nodal and Peripheral Points of Pandemic Discourse: Paradigmatics and Syntagmatics

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to describe the processes of meaning formation of the pandemic discourse on the material of the collection of interviews with students about their life in conditions of self-isolation in the spring 2020. The semantic integrity of the discourse at the level of language practices is achieved due to the stability of its nodes (key and topical words), which, in turn is backed by strong semantic connections among their moments (already fixed meanings). We measure and describe these connections with KHCoder, the statistical content analysis program, using the functions of collecting associations (probabilities of occurrence of words) and compiling semantic maps. The result of the work consists in description of the center, the near periphery and far periphery of the nodes of the pandemic discourse covid, corona, self-isolation, quarantine, coronavirus, mask, gloves, remotely, zoom. (English) [ FROM AUTHOR]