Lexicon of pandemics: a semantic analysis of the Spanish flu and the Covid-19 timeframe terminology
ISSN: 0022-0418
Article publication date: 14 December 2021
Issue publication date: 30 May 2022
Abstract
Purpose
The aim of this study is a semantic comparative analysis between the current pandemic and the Spanish flu. It is based on a bilingual terminological perspective oriented to evaluate and compare the terms used to describe and communicate the pandemic's issues both to biomedical experts and to a non-specialist public.
Design/methodology/approach
The analysis carried out is a terminological comparative investigation performed on two corpora, the first containing scientific English articles, the second Italian national newspapers' issues on two pandemics, the Spanish flu and the current Covid-19 disease, towards the detection of semantic similarities and differences among them through the implementation of computational tasks and corpus linguistics methodologies.
Findings
Given the cross-fielding representativeness of terms, and their relevance within specific historical eras, our study is conducted both on a synchronic and on a diachronic level to discover the common lexical usages in the dissemination of the pandemic issues.
Originality/value
The study presents the extraction of the main representative terms about two pandemics and their usages to share news about their trends among the population and the integration of a topic modeling detection procedure to discover some of the main categories representing the lexicon of the pandemics with reference to a list of classes created by external thesauri and ontologies on pandemics. As a result, a detailed overview of the discrepancies, as well as similarities, retrieved in two historical corpora dealing with a common subject, i.e. the pandemics' terminology, is provided.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Authors have equally contributed to this work; however, Antonietta Folino particularly focused on “Corpus construction” and “Term extraction” sections, Claudia Lanza on “Term categorization” section, Erika Pasceri on “Introduction”, “Pandemic Terminology issues” and “Discussion” and Anna Perri on “Historical background” and “Conclusions and future perspectives” sections.
Citation
Lanza, C., Folino, A., Pasceri, E. and Perri, A. (2022), "Lexicon of pandemics: a semantic analysis of the Spanish flu and the Covid-19 timeframe terminology", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 78 No. 4, pp. 933-952. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-08-2021-0157
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited