342 | nº 31, pp. 341-360 | doxa.comunicación
July-December of 2020
The digital ecosystem during the COVID-19 Crisis: new normality and lockdown easing and lifting
ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978
1. Introduction. Theoretical framework
Language is a living and flexible system that evolves and adapts to different social environments within a community of speakers as the result of new social developments and renewed communication environments.
The foregoing derives from the formulations of diverse classical language analysts, who could be regarded as the fathers of general linguistics and advocates of the adaptive capacity of natural language. The visible connection between that capacity for coining new concepts and their gradual implementation in light of the new reality resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic draws from this premise. Likewise, it is important not to forget the manifest dissemination of these concepts on communication platforms or the lexicalisation (namely, their diachronic incorporation into the vocabulary of our language) of specific concepts and expressions that have emerged from a new intellectual and experiential worldview.
Indeed, one of the essential characteristics that differentiate human beings from other beings inhabiting and coexisting in the world is the former’s ability to communicate thanks to an articulate language (Chomsky, 1987). So much so that, because of its symbolic capacity, we interconnect simple facts for the purpose of constructing other more complex and subtle ones, resulting in the universe of meaning that we call the world and which we are familiar with and transmit employing words that all the speakers of the same language share.
Since Saussure introduced the basic dichotomy between language and speech, as a result of the advances in general linguistics, information sciences, robotics and artificial intelligence, among other disciplines and fundamental lines of research, the basic schema has undergone many modifications at a diachronic level.
For language only possesses meaning for specific speakers who express it through their acts, whereby speech is the use to which they put language at a particular time and place. In short, Language and speech are reciprocal to the point that language is such because of speech and vice versa, and they only make sense in that dichotomic structure.
dológicamente utilizaremos dos procedimientos, uno deductivo en el que estableceremos el marco teórico que sustenta la fluidez, permeabilidad y flexibilidad del lenguaje para adaptarse a novedo-sas situaciones, y otro inductivo en el que, partiendo de las cate-gorías conceptuales emergentes, esbozaremos la implementación de un corpus de palabras que posiblemente muchas de ellas que-den incorporadas en el campo léxico de los hablantes en virtud de su cooperación interactuante en el ecosistema digital. En paralelo, nos detendremos en el análisis descriptivo, cualitativo y etimoló-gico de tres nuevos eufemismos (nueva normalidad, desescalada y desconfinamiento) que tienen un marcado carácter terminal de la crisis sanitaria y que poseen una consideración paradigmática para futuras investigaciones.
Palabras clave:
COVID-19; ecosistema digital; nueva normalidad; desescalada; desconfinamiento.
employed: on the one hand, a deductive method for establishing the theoretical framework in order to analyse the fluidity, permeability and flexibility of language in this new situation; and, on the other, an inductive method, based on emerging conceptual categories, for creating a corpus of words, many of which will probably be incorporated into the lexicon of the citizenry owing to their interaction in the digital ecosystem. Specifically, the focus will be placed here on a descriptive, qualitative and etymological analysis of three new euphemisms (‘new normality’, ‘lockdown easing’ and ‘lockdown lifting’), due to their strong association with the end of public health crisis and to the fact that they may well be considered as paradigmatic for future research.
Keywords:
COVID-19; digital ecosystem; new normality; lockdown easing; lockdown lifting.
