MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF COVID-19 NEOLOGISM AND ITS RELEVANCE

Abstract

This research looked at the morphological analysis of Covid-19 Neologism and its relevance. Languagebeing dynamic in nature played significant roles in the large number of new words (neologism) thatcame into existence or use since the emergence of Covid-19. Some of these words were looked into inorder to ascertain their mode of formation. Similarly, their relevance was looked into. This study wascarried out to find out how these words were formed and their relevance. It equally analyzed these newwords in order to ascertain their morphological structures and processes, their parts of speech andmeanings. The descriptive qualitative design was used for the study and onomasiological theory of wordformation by Pavol Stekauer 1962 and the traditional parsing theory were used for the analysis. Thedata which comprised new words for the analysis were derived from internet sources and texts. At theend of the analysis, the findings revealed that most of the new words were content words mostly nounsand verb. The common morphological processes in the formation of the new words were compounding,blending, affixation and acronyms. Furthermore, most of the new words followed the compoundstructure of the free and bound morphemes. It was also discovered that these words motivated by thecontent of situation. Based on the findings, the researchers concluded that the Covid-19 pandemic wordswere created as a result of the issue at hand and these new words followed the morphological processand structure of neologisms and have also added to the English language vocabularies.