We’re entering a housing bubble, while leaving our pandemic bubble: Changing meanings of bubble in relation to the outbreak of COVID-19

Abstract

Motivated by Charteris-Black’s (2021) observations on changing meanings of COVID-19-related linguistic expressions, this study shows that the polysemous lexical item bubble’s extended uses are significantly accounted for by COVID-era usages. A total of 4,119 tokens of bubble-compounds (X + bubble and bubble + X) were identified in the Coronavirus Corpus. The major categories of bubble-compounds’ uses are the prototypical sense (Prototypical), those referring to the ephemeral nature of bubbles (EPHEMERALITY), and those evoking an enclosed space with boundaries (ENCLOSURE). The study argues that the changing meanings of bubble-compounds are metaphorically motivated (Lakoff 2006[1993]) and shows how conceptual motivation helps obtain the intended construal. The tokens classified in the ENCLOSURE category constitute more than two-thirds of the total dataset (68.41%), and the instances all refer to the concept of pandemic-era social restrictions. Based on the distribution, the study demonstrates that the radial network of the polysemous lexeme bubble has been expanding, motivated by real-world experiences via conceptual metaphor and image-schematic construal. The discussion also touches on different reification patterns of the semantic properties of bubble’s counterparts in three non-Indo-European languages, Korean, Japanese, and Thai, where different patterns of form and meaning pairings are accounted for in construing the concepts of EPHEMERALITY and ENCLOSURE. This crosslinguistic comparison provides an outstanding illustration of how the meanings covered by a single lexical item in one language can be carved up in different but still conceptually motivated ways in other languages.