「サラリーマン川柳」 に見るコロナ禍に関する 語彙表現とイメージの一断面

Abstract

The prolonged global Covid-19 pandemic has significantly altered the daily lives of people all over the world. This influence can be confirmed in all fields, and various linguistic aspects can be identified. As this is a never-before-experienced phenomenon, it cannot be expressed using only existing vocabulary; therefore, new words have been created, or the meaning or connotation of existing words have been altered or expanded. This study aims to shed light on what kind of expressions people use and how they use such expressions in such a situation and what meaning or image they attribute to the expressions. To achieve the aforementioned objective, 200 works submitted in 2020 and 2021 to “Salaryman Senryu,” a literary arts contest with public participation, were chosen as research subjects. For the research procedure, by analyzing the target works, the most frequent vocabularies were extracted Next, the image of each word was considered by observing the contents of the works, with a focus on the works in which frequent words are used. As a result, family-related words such as ‘wife’ and ‘daughter’ and workplace-related words such as ‘boss’ and ‘conference’ were routinely used, and it was confirmed that such expressions frequently appeared in past ‘Salaryman Senryu’ submissions. Second, the presence of new words that emerged during the global Covid-19 pandemic, such as ‘mitsu’ and ‘Covid-19 pandemic,’ was confirmed. Third, expressions such as 'mask' and ‘telework’ are well-established words, but their frequency of use has increased in the context of the pandemic, and it is confirmed that the meaning or image of such words has been expanded or modified. Then, the contents of the works were analyzed with a focus on the use of the aforementioned frequently occurring words. As a result, it was possible to confirm that the image of such words as ‘wife’ was maintained as it has always been; however, regarding such words as ‘mask’ and ‘covid-19 pandemic’, various aspects that would be difficult to grasp with just dictionary definitions have additional or expanded images.