Medical acronyms during COVID-19 pandemic: A corpus-driven analysis of Italian and English popularizing and specialised medical language.

The language of medicine offers intriguing challenges to both medical experts and linguists since it is a highly specialised language. Moreover, medical communication addresses very diverse audiences. Especially with the COVID-19 pandemic, ordinary people have begun to deal with medical terminology, which have quickly become part of the common language. This study examines the medical acronyms used in Italian and English during the COVID-19 pandemic and analyses their use on two levels of specialisation: popular science and specialised discourse. The goal of the dissertation is to investigate to what extent specialised medical acronyms became part of the general language during the pandemic, focusing on the frequency, the concordances and the collocations of the acronyms used in both English and Italian, through a corpus-driven analysis. After an introduction to medical language, methodology for the investigation is presented which encompasses an intra-linguistic study comparing the same acronyms in popular science and specialised corpora and an inter-linguistic study that traces the differences between the two languages highlighting the acronyms that are common to both English and Italian or that have different patterns of use in the two languages under consideration.