Que dit la créativité lexicale de la crise de Covid-19 ? Le cas du français

Christine Jacquet-Pfau

doi:10.18778/8220-879-5

Keywords: Commemoration, 50th anniversary, Institute of Romance Studies, University of Lodz, live, survive, revive

Published: 23 August 2022

Categories: Foreign language studies, Linguistics, Open Access

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The COVID-19 pandemic, with its medical, economic and social implications, provides a unique opportunity to investigate the endless creativity it gave rise to in all areas, including language, showing just how society can cope with a crisis situation unprecedented in its duration and seriousness. The analysis carried out in this paper shows what lexical resources French provided to put into words a situation which utterly transformed behaviour and social norms. Certain typical keywords have been selected for analysis from the latest edition of a general language reference dictionary, Le Petit Larousse illustré 2022, including neologisms of meaning (confinement), neologisms of form (quatorzaine), direct or indirect loans and equivalents proposed (COVID-19, distanciation sociale…). There are no playful occasionalisms to speak of in the dictionary corpus. The impact of the crisis situation on the reception of loanwords from English is also evaluated.

Christine Jacquet-Pfau, CY Cergy Paris Université (France)

Christine Jacquet-Pfau a été maître de conférences au Collège de France (Paris). Elle est membre du laboratoire « Lexiques, Textes, Discours, Dictionnaires » à CY Cergy Université Paris. Ses travaux et publications portent sur la néologie, les emprunts, les dictionnaires et le xixe siècle (notamment les encyclopédies). Directrice de la collection « La Lexicothèque » aux éditions Lambert-Lucas (Limoges), elle est également codirectrice de la revue Cahiers de lexicologie et fait partie de plusieurs comités de lecture de revues, dont celui de Neologica.

Elle a notamment publié, avec J.-F. Sablayrolles, La Fabrique des mots français (Limoges : Lambert-Lucas, 2016), avec A. Napieralski et J.-F. Sablayrolles, Emprunts néologiques et équivalents autochtones : Études interlangues (Łódź : Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2018), et a dirigé La vulgarisation dans les dictionnaires et encyclopédies, n° 57 de La Linguistique (Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 2020).

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How to Cite

Jacquet-Pfau, Christine. 2022. “What Does Lexical Creativity Have to Say about the Covid-19 Pandemic? The Case of French”. In The Art of Living, Surviving, Reviving. Studies in Linguistics. The 50th Anniversary of Romance Studies at the University of Łódź, edited by Magdalena Lipińska and Magdalena Szeflińska-Baran. Poland: Lodz University Press. https://doi.org/10.18778/8220-879-5.11.