A CORPUS-BASED LEXICAL ANALYSIS OF COVID-19 SPECIAL MESSAGES BY THE FORMER PRIME MINISTER OF MALAYSIA

Background and Purpose: The global emergence and rise of COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 have a serious effect on a nation's economic and social well-being, including Malaysia. During lockdown period, the former Prime Minister delivered Special Messages on the updates of COVID-19 issues in Malaysia on television. A specialised Malay corpus, i.e., Cov-19 Related Special Messages Corpus, consisting of 19 Special Messages texts by Muhyiddin Yasin, the former Prime Minister of Malaysia was examined to reveal its lexical profiling. Methodology: The specialised corpus was analysed using Sketch Engine tool, fully utilising the Wordlist, Keyword, and Concordance functions for the purpose of lexical analysis. The list of lexical items was then compared with the same list of items in the Malaysian Web (MalaysianWaC), a default Malay Reference Corpus set in Sketch Engine. Findings: Through wordlist analysis, the most frequently used words in the analysed corpus are generally linked to political or government entity (e.g., kerajaan, menteri, and perdana) and the welfare of the Malaysians (e.g., rakyat, kesihatan, and epidemik). The keyword analysis indicates that words related to the containment of the pandemic and reference to the Malaysians (e.g., saudara-saudari, pelitup, and penjarakan) show high keyness values. Finally, through concordance analysis some words with high keyness scores are used differently in both specialised Malay corpus and Reference Corpus. From the analyses, the most used words in the specialised corpus are related to the issue of COVID-19. Contributions: It is hoped that this study would contribute to the corpus linguistic studies on COVID- 19 to comprehend the use of COVID-19 related lexical items.