Pejorative constructions and paradigmatic relations. A cross-linguistic analysis of the concept HEAD

Abstract

The human body is a rich source of productive patterns of pejoration cross-linguistically, often with racist or sexist connotation. In our talk, we focus on body parts that are connected to the category of [+upper body part] (henceforth HEAD), found in metonymical expressions featuring nouns meaning ‘head’, ‘face’, ‘brain’, or ‘skull’, such as English head in airhead (Sánchez Fajardo 2022: 167–174) or face in buttface (Mattiello 2024: 28–31). Similar examples are Dutch stomkop ‘stupid head’, Swedish pappskalle ‘cardboard skull’ or Serbian pileći mozak ‘chicken brain’, all meaning ‘fool’. In the Romance languages, by contrast, HEAD expressions are phrasal lexemes, e.g. Italian testa di rapa ‘head of turnip; fool’, or Spanish cabeza de ladrillo ‘brickhead; fool’. A Swedish and a Spanish example are given in [1-2]: [1] Den där pappskallen Harlekin har jag sett på andra bloggar också. [svTenTen20] ‘I have seen that fool Harlekin in other blogs as well’ [2] un trabajo de ficción para ver si el cabeza de ladrillo [...] entraba en razón [esTenTen18] ‘a fictional essay that is meant to see if the brickhead comes into his senses’ The aim of our talk is to present a comparative analysis of pejorative HEAD constructions in five languages: Dutch, Swedish, Italian, Spanish and Serbian, drawing data from web corpora at SketchEngine (MaCoCu for Serbian, TenTen for the other languages). For each language, we extract all HEAD collocations, removing all irrelevant hits (like English forehead). The remaining lemmas will be annotated for formal and semantic properties, such as the collocate of HEAD (i.e. the first compounding member in the Germanic languages and in Serbian; the prepositional complement of the OF-phrase in the Romance languages), or the referent of the expression (i.e. the (gender of) the person it refers to). These annotations, coupled with the token frequencies of each lemma, allow us to identify clusters of HEAD expressions. The following two RQs will be addressed: RQ1: Should compounds and phrasal lexemes be integrated into word-formation paradigms? RQ2: Do cross-linguistic differences in compounding affect word-formation paradigms? We adopt a constructionist approach to morphology (Booij 2010), which sees complex words not as a concatenation of morphemes, but as meaningful units in their own right that are paradigmatically related to other complex words. Where RQ1 is concerned, we argue that the notion of paradigm can be extended to compounding (e.g. Gaeta & Angster 2019; Hathout & Namer 2019; Bagasheva 2021), but also to phrasal lexemes. This implies that, like derivational constructions (Norde & Morris 2018), compounding constructions can be linked both interparadigmatically (e.g. all Swedish compounds ending in -skalle ‘skull’) and intraparadigmatically (e.g. all Swedish compounds made up of the same base and a different HEAD unit, e.g. dumskalle ‘stupid skull’ and dumhuvud ‘stupid head’). As to RQ2, we show that in both Modifier-Head and Head-Modifier languages, the evaluative unit undergoes a metonymization process (HEAD > PERSON), but that semantic secretion is even more prominent in Modifier-Head constructions, where the HEAD unit is used in the rightmost position, such that its paradigms are closer to affixation. References Bagasheva, Alexandra. 2021. Paradigmaticity in Compounding. In Jesús Fernández-Domínguez, Alexandra Bagasheva & Cristina Lara Clares (eds.), Paradigmatic Relations in Word Formation, 21–48. Leiden: BRILL. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004433410. Booij, Geert. 2010. Construction Morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gaeta, Livio & Marco Angster. 2019. Stripping paradigmatic relations out of the syntax. Morphology 29(2). 249–270. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-018-9326-2. Hathout, Nabil & Fiammetta Namer. 2019. Paradigms in word formation: what are we up to? Morphology 29(2). 153–165. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-019-09344-3. Mattiello, Elisa. 2024. A morphosyntactic and morphosemantic analysis of English slang suffixoids. Studi e Saggi Linguistici 62(1). https://doi.org/10.4454/ssl.v62i1.380. Norde, Muriel & Caroline Morris. 2018. Derivation without category change. A network-based analysis of diminutive prefixoids in Dutch. In Kristel Van Goethem, Muriel Norde, Evie Coussé & Gudrun Vanderbauwhede (eds.), Category Change from a Constructional Perspective (Constructional Approaches to Language), 47–90. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. https://benjamins.com/catalog/cal.20.03nor. (5 July, 2023). Sánchez Fajardo, José A. 2022. Pejorative Suffixes and Combining Forms in English (Studies in Language Companion Series). Vol. 222. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.222