Comparative study of stylistic devices used during COVID-19 in Azerbaijani and English languages

Abstract

The impact of COVID pandemic on every field of life left its traces on language as well. There appeared new COVID related terms, COVID vocabulary with new insights and meanings. As a result of the newly developed discourse, there appeared new topic for many researchers and scholars to be investigated. In this paper we also aimed to study the same topic from different perspective, thus, the paper intended to make a comparative study between Azerbaijani and English languages through the stylistic reflection of the COVID discourse. The investigation of the new COVID related stylistic devices was based on whole media discourse including the speeches of political leaders and newspapers. As the role of stylistic devices is considered to be inevitable in making expressiveness, it was regarded as the best tool to achieve the persuasion in COVID discourse. In this paper the speeches of political leaders and the media sources were taken as the main materials for conducting the study. By making a monthly analysis for the stylistic devices of both languages the frequency of the COVID related stylistic devices was drawn. Moreover, the research indicates that although two languages are from the different edges of the language groups, the reflection of the COVID related stylistic devices in both languages is not too much different. This argument was proved by the numbers of the stylistic devices, especially, by the statistical numbers of the metaphors. To achieve all the goals of the study the constructed corpus was analysed and the statistical results were drawn.