Corpus Diagnostics in Linguistic Construction: Vaccination Against COVID-19 in the German-Language Media Discourse

Abstract

In 2020, German media experienced a surge of publications about vaccination against COVID-19, which demonstrated a great diversity of linguistic tools that could shape public opinion on the matter. This article introduces a study of neological processes in the German language in the post-pandemic period. The research relied on the method of corpus diagnostics to develop a linguistic reconstruction of the COVID-19 vaccination as a media event. The research covered 612 news articles published in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland between January 1, 2021, and December 31, 2021. The Voyant Tools software generated a corpus of news texts with Impfung for a subsequent analysis, which made it possible to reveal lexical trends, correlations, and collocations. The corpus analysis provided a linguistic reconstruction of the vaccination against COVID-19 in the German-speaking countries. Austrian and Swiss media discourse emphasized the need for vaccination for all citizens while Germany focused on the social aspects of vaccination. Pfizer / BioNTech and AstraZeneca appeared to be the most discussed vaccines in the German-speaking area.

Keywords

• vaccination against covid-19
• neologism
• media event
• german
• media discourse
• corpus linguistics