An Empirical Analysis of Extended Meanings of Lexical Items in a H1N1 Corpus

The year 2009 has witnessed a global outbreak of a new strain of influenza A virus subtype H1N1. Despite the high exposure on the mass media, few researches have been conducted on the discourse related to the H1N1 event. This study examined six frequently-occurred lexical items in a pandemic (H1N1) corpus: influenza, pandemic, cases, virus, transmission and death, using Sinclair's (2004) descriptive model of lexical items. WordSmith 5.0 (Scott, 2010) was used to generate a keyword list and concordances. The randomly-selected concordances were then analysed from five perspectives, the core, collocation, colligation, semantic preference and semantic prosody. The findings show that the extended meanings of the lexical items are specific in the context of pandemic H1N1 event and they are interrelated in the context. It is argued that it is the study of lexical items rather than single words that enables language learners to better understand the meanings of words.