Problems of linguistic and communication research during COVID-19 pandemic (using capabilities of VOSviewer program)

Statement of the problem. Over the past five years, the Russian scientific community has been closely studying the nature of the coronavirus, the processes of its development and spread, as well as its impact on society. Linguistics contributes to the process of understanding the COVID-19 pandemic at the level of linguistic consciousness and its reflection in texts and the language system. At the same time, the problem of systematizing such studies arises. The purpose of the article. The consequences of the pandemic, which are still felt by the world community, and, as a consequence, the above-formulated need for deep scientific reflection of this phenomenon determine the goal set by the author - to identify the main directions of substantive analysis that organize the topics and content of modern linguistic and, more broadly, communicative works. Methodology in this case is based on the detection and visualization of a set of significant relationships in Russian- language linguistic articles on pandemic topics published during the development of the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19); metadata processing was carried out using the VOSviewer program. Research results. The results obtained showed that the most frequent keywords used by authors in 2019-2023 were distributed into two groups. The first group includes ‘coronavirus’, ‘pandemic’, ‘covid-19’; these lexemes and their contextual synonyms become verbal symbols of the COVID-19 pandemic and, at the same time, objects of versatile linguistic analysis. This semantic field is expanded by keywords and phrases ‘vaccination’, ‘vaccines’, ‘fighting the epidemic’, ‘quarantine’, ‘lockdown’, which detail the object of analysis and support the context, as they indicate ways of society’s response to the pandemic and its consequences. The second group of keywords - ‘media’, ‘mass media’, ‘media discourse’, ‘journalism’, ‘Internet’, ‘social networks’ - denote global types of discourses that have attracted attention amid the pandemic.