On the impact of extralinguistic and intralinguistic factors on the vocabulary enrichment of the French language during the pandemic
Authors: Tarasova M. V. 
Published: April 2024

The article is devoted to the study of neologisms that emerged in the French language from 2020 to 2023, as well as of the role of factors that caused the enrichment of the commonly used French language during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The purpose of the study is to establish which lexical units of the Covid-19 pandemic period were included in the dictionaries of Le Robert  and  Larousse;  to find out at the expense of which vocabulary, from the point of view of the sphere of use, the enrichment of the commonly used French language occurred; to identify the types of neologisms characteristic of this period, as well as to establish the most productive ways of their formation; to identify the relationship between the types of neologisms and the factors that caused their appearance.

In the course of the work, an interdisciplinary approach was used, which allowed us to take into account the relationship between two scientific disciplines: linguistics and personality psychology and included methods of observation, description, interpretation, classification, as well as lexicological and semantic analysis.

The analysis of the results showed that the commonly used French language has been enriched primaily by professional vocabulary, medical terms in the first place, then by technical terms, and military terms; as well as by social vocabulary related to the life support services of  homo socialis and its behavior in new realities. As for the types of neologisms that appeared during the pandemic, lexical and semantic neologisms predominate among them, while the number of loan neologisms is extremely small. The most productive ways of forming lexical neologisms during this period were prefixation and contamination.

Intralinguistic and extralinguistic factors had a significant impact on the neologization of the French language. The latter include not only objective, but also subjective factors, to which we refer the emotional states of an individual. The emotions of the pandemic, as a response to economic, cultural and psychological shocks, have contributed to the process of updating the lexical composition of the French language. Thus, due to the interaction of negative emotions of fear, anger and disappointment with intellectual emotions of humor and irony, a large number of lexical neologisms, including game derivatives, appeared, while the combination of negative emotions of fear and positive emotions of interest contributed to the transition of professionalism into the category of commonly used vocabulary, replenishing the language with semantic neologisms.

The emotions of the pandemic, realizing their three functions: evaluative, motivational and protective, served as a kind of impulse to enrich the vocabulary of the French language. The lexicological analysis was based on the materials from the Le Robert  and  Larousse electronic dictionaries and from the websites of such media outlets as  Le Monde, Le Figaro, La Croix, Ouest-France, Le Journal du Dimanche, Rue 89, Slate, Franceinfo.