Cambios semánticos en "virus y pandemia" desde la lingüística de corpus y la sociolingüística

Abstract

The coronavirus has promoted the semantic change in the words „virus” and „pandemic”. We believe that, increasingly, a metaphorical use of both words is occurring (as happened in the past with „cancer”). Therefore, in this study, the semantic characteristics of this change are systematized and detailed in the first place. Subsequently, we have designed a corpus with 480 sentences, balanced sociolinguistically to analyze the change quantita-tively and qualitatively. Quantitatively, it will be reviewed if the change is present in all social groups and if any group promotes it. Qualitatively, it will be found that the metaphorical use of „virus”, „pandemic” and „cancer” is complementary: each of these words is used in very specific semantic collocations.