Contrastive analysis of the spreading of neological terms in the media during pandemics

The main objective of this paper is to locate and analyse those neological terms that have spread through the media during pandemic periods in order to assess the impact of the influenza A and COVID-19 pandemics on the Spanish language from Spain. Based on the hypothesis that a wide variety of neologisms have emerged during the influenza A and COVID-19 pandemics, this paper uses corpus linguistics to establish and study two corpora based on news items from the pandemic years. Neologism candidates are extracted from these corpora and classified according to specific neologicity criteria to determine whether or not they constitute neologisms. This research also studies the impact of neologisms on newspapers. A terminology extractor is used to establish the index of terminological density of each of their corpora in order to determine whether or not the news items in the newspapers have become semi-specialised texts.