doxa.comunicación | nº 31, pp. 341-360 | 351
July-December of 2020
Lucia Ballesteros-Aguayo and Francisco Javier Escobar Borrego
ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978
Table 3. Pragmatic analysis of ‘new normality’
Pragmatic analysis of ‘new normality’
The recent character of ‘the normal’ implies optimism, immediate variation in the sense of recuperating an order that was lost during the public health crisis, whereby it has positive connotations. This, together with the character of ‘the new’ as something recently made, recently incorporated, tends to lead the citizenry to believe that changeableness in the social context imposes a familiarity that society as a whole has lacked during the pandemic.
The return to normal, to the natural rules that have always been in force, has the purpose of creating a sensation of regulated control so as to alleviate or counter the unpleasant and precarious situation experienced before due to the lockdown declared during the state of alert.
To return to the ‘new normality’, the maxim pronounced by the health authorities, has and denotes an ideological bias disproportionately in favour of those allowing the citizenry to return to that state. In the cultural context, it is tacitly understood that the restoration of the balance in the ordered, habitual and daily forms of the past is the result of the management of the pandemic, in which efficient measures conducive to a promising vision for the future have been implemented.
It implies improvement, progress, getting over the abnormality experienced during the previous situation and a return to the past freedom characterised by order and stability.
It is disseminated via the digital ecosystem on a massive scale.
Source: own elaboration
According to Table 1, ‘Common characteristics of the vocabulary relating to the COVID-19 disease disseminated on digital platforms’, ‘new normality’ is an inconsistent euphemistic expression.
The contradiction inherent to this expression means that it is somewhat difficult for speakers to understand, which is one of the basic reasons why its lexicalisation in the collective vocabulary of Spanish speakers may pose problems, in view of the fact that it requires their cooperation.
In this case, the absurdness of the union of two contradictory concepts (‘new’ and ‘normal’) makes them unintelligible inasmuch as they are necessarily specious. For in order that a contradiction should be intelligible, the hearer needs to modify the language rules in a way similar, if we may say, to changing the rules of a sports competition. This breaking of the rules thus calls for an extraordinary effort, when taking into account that the human mind ends up rejecting absurd statements. In the words Leech (1981 [1974]: 7),
It seems to be an incontrovertible principle of semantics that the human mind abhors a vacuum of sense; so a speaker of English faced with absurd sentences will strain his interpretative faculty to the utmost to read them meaningfully.
Nonetheless, it is plausible from both the Chomskyan distinction between competence and execution and the Wittgensteinian notion of language-games described above, since such a definition allows us to distance ourselves from any rigid conception that may inexorably impose a false character on all syntactic or semantic innovation. In other words, by virtue of competence.
