Language, subject and history: the construction of meanings in the Pandemic of the Coronavirus

Abstract

The historical moment called the Coronavirus Pandemic changed not only the habits of individuals, but also the meanings produced by the language, directly affecting the formation of new words, syntactic arrangements, attributing unprecedented meanings to already crystallized utterances. This establishment of new relationships of meaning in the pandemic caught our attention. Based on this concern, the present study aims to analyze how the pandemic historicity experienced acts directly in the construction of meanings in Brazilian Portuguese in its morphological, syntactic and semantic processes. The theoretical apparatus chosen to support this research consists of some concepts developed by Michel Foucault, in his archaeological phase, such as enunciation, enunciative function and historicity. We consider that the referred notions are able to help in the understanding of the linguistic changes initiated by the pandemic. The result found was that we envision the speakers, in an organic and spontaneous way, appropriating the linguistic rules and making vivid changes, reflecting the relationship between language and history.