THE LINGUO-CREATIVE POTENTIAL OF RUSSIAN COLLOQUIAL SPEECH (BASED ON THE MATERIAL OF THE “DICTIONARY OF THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE OF THE COVID-19 ERA”)

The article provides a brief overview of the word-building linguo-creative potential of the neologisms of the COVID-19 pandemic period presented in the “Dictionary of the Russian language of the COVID-19 era” (Saint Petersburg, 2021) and its forthcoming reissue. It is quantitative parameters that are relevant for understanding the scale of the above-mentioned potential: for instance, the dictionary comprises about 3500 language and speech neologisms selected from the media and the Internet in the period between 2020 and 2021 and thematically related to the pandemic, while the forthcoming dictionary reissue contains approximately 7200 words and phrases of such type which entered the Russian language from 2020 to 2022. The sample of units selected for analysis only includes the lexemes built with the root words covid- (about 3000 items) and corona(virus) - (about 1300 items). New words with these roots were formed with the help of affixation (about 800 units), compounding (over 3000 units), blending (109 units), and conversion / zero-derivation nominalization (about 20 units). Compounding and blending belong to the word-formation types that help realize the creative potential to the f ullest while coining the situational context vocabulary. Other forms of language creativity are also used within the framework of the pandemic discourse. A brief overview of the wordformation types (including the occasional ones) conducted in the research allows us to consider the linguo-creative potential of colloquial speech to be theoretically unlimited. However, in practice the limitations do exist due to the very context of the extralinguistic situation, the limited range of concepts involved in this situation, as well as the capabilities of the language system.