Lingual presentation of coronavirus in Ukrainian religious media discourse

Abstract

The coronavirus pandemic has caused changes not only in public life, but has affected language systems also. The lexical structure of languages has responded to the global pandemic with many innovations. According to the results of linguistic researches, the texts in mass media have become a productive environment for the creation of neologisms. These tendencies are also noticeable in the Ukrainian language system. Besides neologisms, the linguistic realities of the coronavirus pandemic have been verbalized in various discursive practices through metaphors, the most common of which are metaphors of war. The purpose of this study is to identify the features of the linguistic presentation of coronavirus disease and related realities in the texts of religious media. The texts of Ukrainian religious figures presented in the media were the source of this study. Pandemic, the virus are endowed with the features of a living person, the ability to move, think, tokens to denote them are combined with a large number of verbs, which are named active actions, cognitive processes etc. In the texts of religious media, like in other discourses, the realities of coronavirus disease are conceptualized through lexical units that are in any way connected with war: enemy, captivity, threat, to strike, to win the war etc., rarely attested metaphors of fire, disease, marine metaphors. The linguistic representation of the coronavirus in religious texts has its own specifics. In the religious consciousness, the coronavirus is perceived as a testing, a warning, an opportunity to rethink a behavior, a lifestyle, and the consequences caused by it are often positively assessed, because they allow strengthening spiritual values. Religious texts are characterized not only by a metaphorical representation of the coronavirus itself, but by the emergence of new metaphors based on the coronavirus vocabulary that verbalize human spiritual life: the virus of selfishness, the virus of indifference, antibodies of solidarity etc. Keywords: coronavirus language, metaphor, personification, religious discourse, religious media.