This study of pejoration in the English language covers general principles of semantics, socio-cultural terms, ability-condition terms, ethical-sexual terms, medical terms, and miscellaneous terms.

<p>So far little research has been done on the term bitch exclusively. The aim of this essay is to find a pattern of teenagers’ uses of the word bitch in various contexts and in different grammatical forms. A further question is whether bitch can be considered a swearword or not.</p><p>The investigation was carried out by using two different corpora which is COLT (The Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language) and Webcorp as the primary sources out of which concordance lines were extracted. These were in turn categorized into different word classes and analyzed in detail. The results show that there were several word classes in which bitch appeared such as noun, verb and adjective and the most common word class is nouns. The results also show that teenagers mainly use the term as a swearword with which they address their peers. In conclusion even though the term bitch did not originally belong to taboo language, however, due to the fact that the word has developed a more negative meaning it can be seen a swearword.</p>

The Interactive and Discursive View of Violence and Resistance proposes the existence of four-discursive-operations that “(i) conceal violence, (ii) mitigate perpetrators’ responsibility, (iii) conceal victims’ resistance, and (iv) blame or pathologize victims” (Coates & Wade, 2004, p.500). These linguistic operations produce incorrect representations of violence that ignore the unilateral nature of acts of violence and, instead focus on pathologizing victims (Coates & Wade, 2004). Examining how violence, victims, perpetrators, and responsibility for the violence are represented in therapy transcripts in which the presenting issue is violence, will allow us to see if linguistic strategies that are used to discredit victims in everyday talk are also used in therapy by therapists. Analysis of 19 therapy transcripts found that the four-discursive-operations were used in each of the transcripts and that therapists often initiated the use of these inaccurate representations or encouraged the perpetrator’s use of four-discursive-operations. / xii, 228 leaves ; 29 cm.

<p>Some people might regard the language of hip-hop as being crude, sexist and inappropriate. Nevertheless, hip-hop culture can also be considered as one of the underground sources of word-formation and language change in mainstream English. Young people have always been a source of language variation and lexical innovation whether we like it or not.</p><p>This essay is focusing on three words frequently used in hip-hop lyrics, namely pimp, queer and chick. The aim of the study is to analyse the semantic change on these words as they are used in hip-hop music and find out whether hip-hop culture has had an influence on the mainstream usage of these words.</p><p>The method used was to study the usage and frequency of these words in hip-hop lyrics and analyse whether there was a similar use in a large diachronic newspaper corpus of American English. The material was predominately found in The Original Hip-hop Lyrics Archive (ohhla.com) and The TIME Magazine Corpus (corpus.byu.edu).</p><p>The results of this study show examples of semantic change in both hip-hop lyrics and mainstream American English and it is concluded that hip-hop culture has an influence on mainstream language above all among the youth.</p>

So far little research has been done on the term bitch exclusively. The aim of this essay is to find a pattern of teenagers’ uses of the word bitch in various contexts and in different grammatical forms. A further question is whether bitch can be considered a swearword or not. The investigation was carried out by using two different corpora which is COLT (The Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language) and Webcorp as the primary sources out of which concordance lines were extracted. These were in turn categorized into different word classes and analyzed in detail. The results show that there were several word classes in which bitch appeared such as noun, verb and adjective and the most common word class is nouns. The results also show that teenagers mainly use the term as a swearword with which they address their peers. In conclusion even though the term bitch did not originally belong to taboo language, however, due to the fact that the word has developed a more negative meaning it can be seen a swearword.

Some people might regard the language of hip-hop as being crude, sexist and inappropriate. Nevertheless, hip-hop culture can also be considered as one of the underground sources of word-formation and language change in mainstream English. Young people have always been a source of language variation and lexical innovation whether we like it or not. This essay is focusing on three words frequently used in hip-hop lyrics, namely pimp, queer and chick. The aim of the study is to analyse the semantic change on these words as they are used in hip-hop music and find out whether hip-hop culture has had an influence on the mainstream usage of these words. The method used was to study the usage and frequency of these words in hip-hop lyrics and analyse whether there was a similar use in a large diachronic newspaper corpus of American English. The material was predominately found in The Original Hip-hop Lyrics Archive (ohhla.com) and The TIME Magazine Corpus (corpus.byu.edu). The results of this study show examples of semantic change in both hip-hop lyrics and mainstream American English and it is concluded that hip-hop culture has an influence on mainstream language above all among the youth.

The purpose of this essay is to identify functional shifts and semantic changes in the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game Lord of the Rings Online. The focus is on new uses of established terms in Standard English and the intent is to see how the word formation processes work in an online gaming environment, and identify the possible reasons behind them. Due to the lack of previous studies of language in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, the aim is to provide some insight into some of the language developments that occur in such an environment. A quantitative method has been utilised in order to distinguish patterns, and the material, in the form of chat logs, has been gathered from Lord of the Rings Online. The chat logs have then been used to create a corpus, and, from this point, a qualitative method has been employed. The corpus has been thoroughly analysed for the words which have undergone functional shifts and/or semantic changes, and a selection of these words are presented and discussed based on word formation process. The findings in this study seem to confirm that language changes in a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game follow the same patterns as in other environments.

This thesis documents the grammatical processes and semantic impact of innovative ways to pejoratively reference individuals through adjectival nominalization. Research on nominalized adjectives suggests that when meanings shift from having one property (1) to becoming a kind with associated properties (2), the noun form often encodes stereotypical attributes: [1] "Her hair is blonde." (hair color); [2] "He married a blonde." (female, sexy, dumb). Likewise, the linguistic phenomenon of genericity refers to classes or kinds and different grammatical structures reflect properties in different ways. In 1 and 2 above, the shift from adjectival blonde to indefinite NP a blonde moves the focus from the definitional characteristic to the prototypical. Similarly, adjectival gay [3] is definitional, but the marked, nominal form [4] adds socially-based conceptions of the "average" gay (example from Twitter): [3] jesus christ i make a joke and now im a gay man? (sexuality) [constructed]; [4] jesus christ i make a joke and now im a gay? … (flamboyant, abnormal). To investigate innovative reference via nominalization, two corpus studies based in human judgment were conducted. In the first study, a subset of the corpus (N=121) was annotated for pejoration by five additional linguists following the same guidelines as the original annotator. In the second study, 800 instances were annotated by non-experts using crowd-sourcing. In both studies we find a correspondence between nominal status and pejorative meaning.

With data from the Corpus of Historical American English, this study charts the semantic development of lame, crippled, handicapped, and disabled from the 1900s to the 2010s. Using both qualitative concordance line examination and frequency data, it attempts to determine what types of change have occurred in American English (as represented by COHA) within each adjective. Further, the study isolates each adjective’s ‘human disability’ reference usage from its total frequency to determine a history of how people with disability have been described in the data period. The study finds that the trends of the adjectives’ ‘disability’ reference sense quite cleanly follows a euphemism treadmill (Pinker, 2007: 320): lame’s descent cooccurs with crippled’s ascent, which is also true for crippled and handicapped, and handicapped and disabled, with some overlap. Notable form-centric developments are the emergence of an abstract sense of lame through a metaphorical application of the ‘disability’ sense; the steady frequency of a metaphorical application of crippled to describe ‘damage’ in an inanimate noun referent; the rise of handicapped’s metonymical handicapped parking, against its general trend; and disabled’s semantically narrowed emergence as the most frequent lexical item after the US civil rights movement.

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