Compressive Word-formation as an Active Process in the Russian Language in the Coronavirus Age

The article is devoted to the compressive word-formation, which is a striking distinctive feature of the coronavirus era language. Based on the action of the economy of speech effort law, it leads not so much to the emergence of information-rich formations, but to the birth of emotionally charged, evaluative, and often humorous neologisms. Using COVID-related vocabulary as research material, the author examines such types of word-formation compression as interword overlap, contamination, univerbation and abbreviation. The choice of this lexical layer is explained by the fact that the coronavirus pandemic, which swept the whole world in the period from 2020 to 2022 and which became a turning point in the life of society, led to the coining of a large number of new words, a significant part of which is the result of compressive word-formation. Among the different types of word-formation compression, the most productive in the word production of COVID neologisms were contamination (kovikuly, karantini, infodemiya) and interword overlap (covideo, pandemiting), while univerbation was less productive (udalenka, distant). Truncation and abbreviation, which act as active methods of word formation in the modern Russian language, on the contrary, were unproductive when it came to coining COVID neologisms. The analysis allowed the author to conclude that the new developments of the coronavirus pandemic era only partially reflect the general trends occurring in the Russian language.