Mechanisms for nominating people in the koronapolszczyzna reflecting the antagonism of Poles’ attitudes towards the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

During the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus pandemic, two opposing, strongly emotionally charged attitudes emerged among Poles – denial of the existence of the pandemic and belief in its existence. The aim of the article is to prove the hypothesis that these attitudes were reflected in the language, and to linguistically characterize the nominations that arose in connection with this. Due to the wealth of material, the authors focused on personal names. The research material comes from stylistically diverse websites. It turned out that people who believed in the existence of the pandemic showed greater linguistic inventiveness compared to those who disregarded it. Only some of the analyzed terms used by each side were neutral in terms of expression. An antagonism of attitudes was clearly visible in the opposition "ours – others", manifested on the linguistic plane in the presence of many lexemes more or less emotionally tinged and negatively evaluative. Among the mechanisms used to nominate representatives of both attitudes, word-formation procedures predominated – both simple derivation and composition. A small part of the collected names of people are borrowings from English.