LEXICOMETRIC EXPLORATION OF THE DISCOURSE ON COVID-19: ANALYSIS OF FOUR STATE AND SUPRANATIONAL INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXTS

ABSTRACT

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared SARS-CoV-2 a pandemic. Within weeks, the virus infected thousands, paralyzing the global economy. Countries rolled out urgent measures to stem the spread of coronavirus and limit the strain on their healthcare systems.This paper reports on a lexicometric analysis of a corpus comprised of four comparable subcorpora (in English, French and Spanish). It analyzes speeches concerning pandemic management delivered by the leaders of the WHO, European Commission (EC), Government of Spain (ES), and Presidency of the French Republic (FR) between January 1, 2020, and September 30, 2021.Drawing on corpus-based linguistics, discourse analysis and lexicometrics, the study considers the vocabulary used in WHO speeches, qualitatively analyzing the most frequently used units and comparing these to the subcorpus as a whole. Terms described relate to a range of emergency measures, war imagery, and vocabulary related to values, qualities and abilities.