Vortrag: From huswif to slut - A diachronic look into the pejoration of women terms

Language plays a large part in how society treats women and thus, it needs to be looked at closer. Women’s rights activism has been on the rise due to misogynistic movements getting more attention by using pejorative language to convey their message. Now, specific communities have started reclaiming words, a phenomenon called ‘linguistic reclamation’. The semantic derogation of women published by Muriel Schulz in 1975 was one of the pilot papers in the research about the pejoration of women terms. It is widely known that terms denoting women have undergone semantic processes since the beginnings of language, but what do these developments tell us about society? With this paper, the developments of the four terms mistress, bitch , pussy and slut have been looked at, testing Schulz’s hypothesis that all terms denoting women have at some point undergone pejoration. Subsequently, the effects of linguistic reclamation have been analyzed using the examples of the terms bitch and slut . To do so, a qualitative analysis of these terms using the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560-1760, the British National Corpus and the Oxford English Dictionary has been made to highlight their historical development and to take a look at their current state in American society. The main takeaway was that Schulz’s hypothesis is correct in the way that these terms have all undergone pejoration at some point. However, it is important to note that linguistic reclamation is heavily influencing this development.

This talk combining historical linguistics and sociolinguistics will mainly look at some of the semantic developments of different terms.

The semantic derogation of women published by Muriel Schulz tells us that most terms denoting women have at some point in time undergone pejoration, but the publication of this paper was almost 50 years ago now, which raises the question - How have these terms changed since then and is Schulz's hypothesis still correct?

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Tag: 28.05.2023
Anfangszeit: 12:10
Dauer: 00:30
Raum: IG 0.457
Track: Sociolinguistics

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