Abstract
The coronavirus crisis has not just had a profound impact on our lifestyles, work and socializing patters, but it penetrated the language, coining novel terms for new reality and bringing new life into already familiar (but seldom or alternatively used) words and expressions. The realm of economy has been no stranger to that process. Being the language of global communication, English has been on the cutting edge of these processes, keenly responding to changes in society and economy. It holds to reason, therefore, that it is the English language that has been the first one to develop an entire definitive ‘Coronavirus Corpus’ bringing together all the most frequently mentioned words and collocations accumulated since the beginning of the outbreak in the space of English language mass media and beyond. In this paper we seek to track the origin and current contexts of the words and expressions most frequently used in the economic discourse with regard to coronavirus pandemic. We also attempted to break up the entire bulk of coronavirus economic vocabulary into groups, depending on their initial, pre-pandemic meaning, as well as their use and etymological attribution.
Keywords: Coronaviruseconomic falloutrecessionrecoverylanguage impactcorpus
Introduction
When we hear about coronavirus crisis, the first thing that springs to mind is the global health emergency. But its repercussions are felt in many more fields of human activities. Just like a healthy economy is a staple of a healthy society, the society’s ailments have direct implications on the economic life. As Schulman (2020), CEO of PayPal put it, obviously, it's a health crisis for so many people. Second thing is, that health crisis has ricocheted, and the world is now in an economic crisis.
According to Wikipedia, “The coronavirus recession, also known as the COVID-19 recession, the Great Shutdown, or the Great Lockdown, is a major global recession which arose as an economic consequence of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic…The pandemic has led to more than a third of the world's population being placed on lockdown to stop the spread of COVID-19. It has caused severe repercussions for economies across the world, following soon after a global economic slowdown during 2019 that saw stagnation of stock markets and consumer activity worldwide…IMF projections suggest that the coronavirus recession will be the most severe global economic downturn since the Great Depression, and that it will be "far worse" than the Great Recession of 2009” (Coronavirus Recession, n.d.).
The speculations about the duration of lockdown measures and all the possible shapes and forms of the recession and further recovery started almost concurrently with the onset of the outbreak. The new realities quickly found their way into the language coining linguistic innovations, neologisms and blend words. Furthermore, those processes happened within the span of literally several weeks. As Scott (2020) from Diplo Blog aptly points out, “
Problem Statement
This paper aims to address the subject of the economic fallout of the coronavirus crisis as reflected in the English language. COVID-19 has not just wreaked havoc to healthcare and lifestyles for many millions of people worldwide but upended many economic processes having led to a massive shutdown of businesses in literally every country of the world and a recession that has already been likened to the scale of the Great Depression. And just like words and expressions such as ‘self-isolation’, ‘lockdown’, ‘shelter-in-place, ‘social distancing’, etc. have been the talk of the town (or the world, for that matter) for over 3 months now, so have the lexical units like ‘shutdown’, ‘furlough’, ‘Nike swoosh recession/recovery”, and ‘jump-start the economy’ come to the foreground in the economic domain and discourse, thus enriching the business language and giving rise to trends and tendencies that provoke a keen research interest in the linguistic manifestation of the new economic (and linguistic) reality. When it comes to attempting to analyse the words most commonly used in the economic discourse with regard to coronavirus crisis, they generally fall into several key categories. Our study aims to single out those main groups of economic lexicon/business vocabulary and give characteristic to the most frequently used lexical units. Those groups are the lexical units newly coined in the context of coronavirus crises (first group) and those existing ones that have been redefined or endowed with new meanings or connotations.
Research Questions
The questions posed by the authors in this research are as follows:
What are the principal groups of lexical units most commonly used in relation to the coronavirus crisis in terms of subject matter and origin (the lexicographic and semantic aspects)?
What is the etymology of the most commonly encountered lexical units in those groups?
How many of the coronavirus-related lexical units are new coinages as opposed to those with a redefined or recovered meaning and how many units within the two latter groups have been earlier used as applied to the previous economic and financial downturns and meltdowns?
Purpose of the Study
The purpose of this study is to gain an insight into the sources of new coinage, comprising, inter alia, linguistic innovations, or neologisms, blend words, and abbreviations. The lexical units investigated also featured terms and idioms previously utilized in the economic domain and invested with a new meaning, as well as those earlier used elsewhere in other types of discourse but adopted by and incorporated into business discourse specifically in the context of the pandemic and its economic ramifications. A distinct objective pursued by the authors is to analyze how many of the lexical units used in the context of coronavirus-induced economic fallout were initially used with regard to the previous crises and collapses.
Research Methods
The study primarily employs the linguopragmatic, cognitive-discursive, and lexicographic methods to analyse the new lexical units emerging and evolving in the English language of business and economic discourse, their origin and functional usage, as well as the quantitative analysis and comparative-contrastive method. The study was mostly relying on the articles in the English-speaking press (digital format) related to the novel coronavirus and its economic and financial impact to identify the new or ‘resurrected’ lexical units, and the “Coronavirus Corpus” to track their etymology and origin, primary meaning, frequency of usage, and most common collocates. The study utilizes the extensive resources of the ‘The Coronavirus Corpus’, which “is designed to be the definitive record of the social, cultural, and economic impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) in 2020 and beyond. Unlike resources like Google Trends (which just show what people are searching for), the corpus shows what people are actually saying in online newspapers and magazines in 20 different English-speaking countries… The corpus (which was first released in May 2020) is currently about 448 million words in size, and it continues to grow by 3-4 million words each day. At this rate, it may be 500-600 million words in size by August 2020” (The Coronavirus Corpus, n.d.).
Findings
The analysis of coronavirus-related words and collocations pertaining to economic discourse extracted from the English-language business media and the ‘Coronavirus Corpus’ was conducted in several stages.
Let us look into each of these groups in more detail.
Also belonging to this group are the labels and lofty titles like
Coronavirus have changed our working patterns, transitioning us into the online space of Zoom calls, which conditioned the coinage of such words and expressions as “
All of these lexical units were never used in the language (moreover, they denote completely new notions that have never been around before), therefore they may be considered linguistic innovations, or neologisms.
In the league of their own are corona-virus related puns, allusions and intertextual wordplay. A graphic example of the latter is the headlines
Unlike Group 1,
A prominent crises-related coinage that made its rentrée and gained new importance in the context of coronavirus crisis, is the blended word ‘
Here, however, we encounter a contradiction, as, truth be told, the word only masks itself as a newcomer but in fact was extensively used before the pandemic (and had a different authorship altogether, too): “
Another interesting representative of this group is used with regard to the pandemic is the portmanteau
A different example is the word combination
The concept of recovery accumulates lexical units denoting some way of economy overcoming the recession, finding its way out of the current gridlock. Here, it is worthwhile mentioning the different words referring to the types of potential recovery, first of all:
The WSJ gives the following definition to this notion: “
The implied association with the famed Nike slogan openly manifests/expresses itself in this Mercury News publication: “…As the U.S. entered its third month of the pandemic-induced lockdown economy, analysts have replaced the # Jill Schlesinger # hopes/predictions of a quick turnaround (and its slower cousin, the " U-shaped " recovery) with a new image: the
Also at the core of the recovery concept are such expressions as ‘to revive economy’, ‘to restart business’, ‘to restart the economic engines’, ‘to jump-start the economy’, ‘the economy bounces back’, ‘rebound of the economy’, etc., as well as the different expressions referring to various measures to get the economy back on track, such as ‘economic resilience’, ‘a major economic booster’, ‘massive economic stimulus’, ‘financial injections/injections of fiscal measures and liquidity’, ‘the rainy day fund’, ‘lender/buyer of last resort’, etc. All those are economic terms that have occupied a long-standing and solid place in the financial and business lexicon.
Remarkably, different national variants of English use different words and word combinations to refer to the economy bailout measures, some of which are utilized in a number of English-speaking countries, others being strictly one-nation-specific (furloughs (the UK) vs. wage subsidies (Australia) vs. rental rebates (Singapore);bill deferrals (Canada) vs. moratorium on debt servicing (India); to cushion vulnerable citizens from the impact of the pandemic (East Africa); the ‘Bayanihan to Heal as One Act’ (the Philippines) (Salazar, 2020).
It is also worthwhile mentioning that both subgroups of lexis (pertaining to recession and recovery) actively employ metaphors that often refer simultaneously to both of them. Those belong to such concepts as “health and medicine”
A closely related word to ‘furlough’ is ‘shutdown’ (including both verb and noun forms such as ‘these measures have led to many businesses being shut down temporarily’, ‘an economy-wide shutdown’, ‘to keep shutdown(s) in place’, etc.). The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) finds to shut down for “close a factory” in 1877, rising out of shut down, or “close by lowering or with a lid,” from the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The earliest shutdowns didn’t refer to governments but to factories. (Kelly, 2018). Unlike furlough, the word was actively used in recent pre-Covid times in 2013 and 2018-2019.
Thus, a new notion from more of a general (as opposed to economy-specific) part of the coronavirus vocabulary spectrum
Statistics-wise, our analysis boils down to the following: an overwhelming majority (63%) of lexical units referring to the economic consequences of the coronavirus crisis refer to Group 2, followed by Groups 1 and 3 represented in almost equal proportions (17% and 15% respectively). Finally, Group 4 was the least productive group accounting for only 5% of the entire bulk of the analyzed lexical units.
Conclusion
Every epidemic in the human history, including the Spanish flu a century ago and SARS almost two decades ago, the natural and utmost desire was for life to get back to social and economic normalcy. But neither had such a large economic effect as Covid-19, and never before the citizens’ expectations of government were as high as today.
The attempt to process and analyze some of the lexical processes caused by the global coronavirus-induced upheaval presented in this paper is far being an exhaustive and is only a humble pilot effort. However, the prospects of further research into the subject without doubt look promising and worth pursuing. Since the economic fallout of the pandemic is far from being over and the painful aftermath still continues to be felt, both in terms of its manifestations and mitigation of its ramifications, the Coronavirus Corpus is set to see new exciting additions to it. Hence, the pandemic-related business vocabulary will be further expanding through both new coinage and reinventing the existing or well forgotten lexical units.
The longer the juggernaut of coronavirus rages in the world, the more profound and enduring its social, political, and economic implications are going to be. It remains to be hoped that the lexical process we are witnessing now will soon pivot so as to accompany and reflect the world transitioning to a pandemic-resilient and shock-resistant economy, rather than the one ailing from its wounds and scars.
Acknowledgments
This study has been made possible thanks to the Department of Foreign Languages at the Faculty of Economics, People’s Friendship University of Russia, and personally its head Elena N. Malyuga.
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Cite this article as:
Kucheryavenko, V. V., & Beletskaya, O. S. (2020). From Shutdown To Swoosh: The Linguistic Fallout Of Coronavirus Crisis In Economic Discourse. In & V. I. Karasik (Ed.), Topical Issues of Linguistics and Teaching Methods in Business and Professional Communication, vol 97. European Proceedings of Social and Behavioural Sciences (pp. 554-563). European Publisher. https://doi.org/10.15405/epsbs.2020.12.02.74