Social and Physical Distance/Distancing: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Recent Changes in Usage

Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and its dramatic spread in the early months of 2020, the term social distancing has rapidly become a key term in public and private discourse. At the same time, social distance, physical distance and physical distancing have become current in the same context. This paper examines these terms in (samples of) four corpora of British English (BNC, ukWaC, NOW 2019 and NOW 2020), with the following aims: (i) to study the frequency and usage of these phrases in corpora of different kinds, representing texts created both before and during the Covid-19 pandemic; (ii) to determine whether the recent spread of the phrases in the Covid-19 context has entailed any shifts in the collocational profile of the constituent words. By looking at the most frequent collocations over time we establish to what extent the corpora reflect stability and change in patterning and to what extent the external factor of the pandemic outbreak has far reaching consequences for the lexical semantics of the language. The case of social distance/distancing has special relevance to accounts of semantic change through the sudden and radical shifts in the collocational profile of the items concerned.