Contagious "Corona" Compounding by Journalists in a CLARIN Newspaper Monitor Corpus

Abstract

Newspaper monitor corpora, which incorporate new materials on a regular basis, are particularly useful for tracking linguistic changes spurred by current developments. The COVID19 pandemic prompted a case study in the Norwegian Newspaper Corpus. The corpus was mined for productive compounds with the stems “corona” and its alternative spelling “korona”, tracing their frequencies and dates of first occurrence during the first wave of the pandemic. The quantitative analysis not only monitored the daily volume and variation of such compounds, but also the dynamics of vocabulary growth, and a change in their preferred spelling. The paper concludes with reflections on methodology and data sources.