ABSTRACT
As early as spring 2020; we began to see blog posts and articles documenting the creation of new words to capture different experiences brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic (see Lawson, 2020; Thorne, 2020; Wild, 2020). In this chapter, we will review the literature on observed language change associated with Covid-19 and briefly discuss the motivations for language change and innovation, as well as the processes by which new words are formed. We will then explore the methods by which researchers have identified and documented language change, with a focus on corpus-based approaches. As a case study example, we use the Coronavirus Corpus ( https://www.english-corpora.org/corona/" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://www.english-corpora.org/corona/ ) to demonstrate how such a dataset enables researchers to observe short-term changes in language, for example by looking at significant increases in frequency month by month over the course of 2020. We discuss the terms that underwent rapid changes in frequency over the course of the pandemic, with a view to identifying lexical innovation by way of neologisms and semantic shifts.
