Language in times of COVID-19: lexical and morphopragmatic analyses of two Austrian media corpora

We investigate frequencies of (1) new vocabulary and (2) evaluative-expressive morphopragmatic forms such as expressive compounds and diminutives in two corpora of German in Austria in the first 22 months of the COVID-19 pandemic: (1) the amc (Austrian Media Corpus), a corpus of newspaper articles using more formal registers and (2) the stf (STANDARD forum corpus), a corpus of user-generated content of more informal forum posts on the COVID live ticker of an online newspaper. Results show significant correlations between frequencies of new COVID-19 vocabulary in both corpora despite the different registers used. However, the timing of emergence and of frequency peaks differs in both corpora, as will be illustrated by the three COVID-19 neologisms Babyelefant ‘baby elephant (= distance measure)’, Covidiot_in ‘covidiot’ and Corona-Leugner_in ‘Corona denier’: New lemmas tend to emerge and increase in the formal amc first before being picked up by the users of the informal stf, leading to later but mostly higher frequency peaks of the lemmas in the stf. The results show also significant correlations between daily new COVID-19 cases and numbers of forum posts as well as between daily new COVID-19 cases and frequencies of morphopragmatic forms produced by forum users, indicating a higher posting activity and the use of more emotional vocabulary in more problematic periods of the pandemic.