On the Impact of Extralinguistic and Intralinguistic Factors on the Vocabulary Enrichment of the French Language During the Pandemic

Abstract

This article is devoted to the study of neologisms that emerged in the French language from 2020 to 2023, as well as of the role of factors that caused the enrichment of everyday French language during the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of the study is to establish which lexical units created during the COVID-19 pandemic were included in the dictionaries of Le Robert and Larousse; identify which vocabulary items (in terms of sphere of use) were used to enrich the French language; determine the types of neologisms and the most productive ways of neologism formation during the pandemic; and identify the relationship between types of neologisms and the factors that caused them to appear. In the course of the work, an interdisciplinary approach was used, which allowed us to take into account the relationship between two scientific disciplines: linguistics and personality psychology and included methods of observation, description, interpretation, classification, as well as lexicological and semantic analysis. The analysis of the results showed that everyday French language has been enriched primarily by professional vocabulary, mostly medical terms, then by technical terms, and military terms, as well as by social vocabulary related to the life support services of homo socialis and its behaviour in the new norm. As for the types of neologisms that appeared during the pandemic, lexical and semantic neologisms predominate, while the number of borrowed neologisms is negligible. The most productive ways of forming lexical neologisms during this period were prefixation and contamination. Intralinguistic and extralinguistic factors had a significant impact on the neologization of the French language. The latter is made up, firstly, of objective factors, and then of subjective factors, which we refer to as the emotional states of the individual. The emotions of the pandemic, as a response to economic, cultural and psychological shocks, have contributed to the process of updating the lexical composition of the French language. The interaction of the negative emotions of fear, anger, and disappointment with the intellectual emotions of humour and irony thus spurred the creation of a large number of lexical neologisms, including playful derivatives, while the combination of the negative emotion of fear the positive emotion of interest contributed to the transition of professionalisms into the category of everyday vocabulary, filling the language with semantic neologisms. The emotions of the pandemic, in realizing their three functions (evaluative, motivating, and protective), served as a kind of impulse for enriching the vocabulary of the French language. The lexicological analysis was based on the materials from the Le Robert and Larousse electronic dictionaries, as well as from the websites of such media outlets as Le Monde, Le Figaro, La Croix, Ouest-France, Le Journal du Dimanche, Rue 89, Slate, and Franceinfo.

English translation from the Russian text: Tarasova M.V. 2024. On the impact of extralinguistic and intralinguistic factors on the vocabulary enrichment of the French language during the pandemic. Linguistics & Polyglot Studies. 10(1). P. 98–112. DOI:    https://doi.org/10.24833/2410-2423-2024-1-38-98-112