Legilinguistic Features of a Semantic Field: COVID-19 in Written News/Media in Hebrew and Arabic

This paper examines and compares some legilinguistic features in news/media reports in Hebrew, and in Arabic in Israel and Egypt during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and the beginning of 2021. The goal was to find frequent and innovated expressions in the communication media during the COVID-19 period. The research question was, since there are linguistic differences between these language-varieties: would differences be found also on the legilinguistic level? Hebrew and Arabic were studied because of their different status. In Israel, Hebrew is the dominant official language, while Arabic is a minority language. In Egypt, Arabic is the official and dominant language. The material was collected from two news/media channels in each of Modern Hebrew and Arabic in Israel, and two from Egypt. Selected news texts were analyzed and examples of their lexical and syntactic elements are presented. The texts revealed similar methods for controlling the pandemic, and some linguistic (lexical and syntactic) differences. The comparison with legilinguistic literature suggests that the findings of these Hebrew and Arabic texts' features during the pandemic differ from features discussed in other studies.