Naslov
Semantic Analysis of Politically Incorrect Terms in the English Language

Autori
Čatlak, Maja

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Ocjenski radovi, diplomski rad, diplomski

Fakultet
Sveučilište u Zadru

Mjesto
Zadar

Datum
01.10

Godina
2014

Stranica
64

Mentor
Fabijanić, Ivo

Ključne riječi
political correctness; gender; ethnicity; illness; disability; euphemism; semantic changes

Sažetak
Political correctness as a term and a movement began its development in the 1960s in the socially loaded spheres of feminist and minority’s struggle for equality and rights, quickly gaining momentum and broadening its scope so that it nowadays includes even environmental and animal rights issues. One of its main recognized practises is the replacement of the so-called “incorrect” language with more “correct”, polite, euphemistic language, based on the assumption that language can, not only change the human perspective, but also help in shaping the reality. The first part of the work represents the theoretical backgrounds as well as the role of political correctness in three main fields: gender, ethnicity and illness and disability. The second part of the work consists of semantic analysis of thirty terms belonging to those three spheres, while the analysis was based on Leonard Bloomfield’s traditional semantic classification. Although the underlying assumption of the work was that politically incorrect terms would owe their incorrectness to certain semantic changes undergone throughout the time, the overall conclusion of the work was that, although that relationship can be assumed in certain cases, an important role in shaping incorrectness also belongs to language external factors, such as the changes which have occurred in the socio-political climate in the second half of the twentieth century.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Filologija

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