Abstract: The article is devoted to the study of the discourse of the German mass media, addressed to the topic of the coronavirus pandemic. Using the examples of magazine articles, television broadcasts and blogs in social networks, a conceptual analysis of the ways of word-formation activity of the German language in the era of coronavirus restrictions is carried out. The subject of the study is the cognitive mechanisms of word formation of the German language and their pragmatic features. The object of the study was the coronavirus discourse of the German-speaking language space. The aim of the work was to reconstruct some concepts of the discursive field "Coronavirus infection", as well as to describe the cognitive mechanisms underlying their formation on the basis of linguistic data. The methods of conceptual and prototypical analysis, as well as cognitive modeling and contextual analysis were used in the study of cognitive mechanisms of word formation. The relevance and novelty of the research lies in the study and description of the latest word-formation phenomena and trends in German-speaking social discourse. As a result of the research, the regularities of the functioning of the main cognitive mechanisms of concept formation were deduced and formulated. The analysis of the German media discourse during the coronavirus pandemic revealed new basic concepts and concepts-components that form conceptual fields. The basic concepts we attributed, for example, such as "Corona", "Mundnasenschutz", "Distanz", "Lockdown", "Panick". As a result of the study, it was concluded that the basic concepts form conceptual fields, including component concepts, the methods of language verbalization of which imply the presence of emotive and evaluative components. The studied and described language material allows us to conclude that the main cognitive mechanisms of concept formation are profiling, conceptual metaphor, conceptual metonymy and contamination.