Researching English Vocabulary Swearing Presentation By Ana, Jose, Maria and Stephen
Jan 15, 2016
Researching English VocabularySwearing Presentation
By Ana, Jose, Maria and Stephen
The word we will be presenting is….
Word formation processes
• Inflection• Derivation
• Compounding
Words with similar functions
Etymology
Old English “bicce”
Germanic only in Old Norse “bikkja“
German “betze “and “petze”
French “biche” “bitch,” and “biche”
?
The most frequent collocation is “son of a bitch”
The collocation “Stuck up bitch” means, a girl or a women who is generally ugly and thinks she is
better than everyone else.
Analysing Google Ngram Viewer: British English
Analysing Google Ngram Viewer: American English
Comparing English and American use
• The uses were very similar except that ‘bitch’ was used more often in British English to describe abstract items.
• The form ‘biatch’ did not appear in the British English corpus on ngram viewer.
• The use of the word ‘bitch’ has peaked in the last 10 years in both British and American English.
Genres in which “bitch” appears
• Highest frequency in the fictional register• In the magazine and spoken registers there is a higher frequency as well in contrast with the newspaper and
academic registers • Possible explanation in fictional register : informal style• The low frequency in the academic and newspaper registers is because these registers use a more formal style
and their aim is to transmit information or explain something.
Corpus of Historical American English
• The highest frequency appears in the year 2000 • Other higher frequencies appear between the years 1960 and 1970.• Conclusion: the word “bitch” became to be a more used word from
1950 in spite of the slight differences across the 20th century.
References
• The Corpus Of Contemporary American English, http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/• Corpus of Historical American English, http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/• Oxford English Dictionary, http://www.oed.com/• Sketch Engine, http://www.sketchengine.co.uk/
Thank you for watching!