Authors

Milena Hebal-Jezierska¹;  ¹ University of Warsaw, Poland

Discussion

The aim of this paper is to present the image of women in Czech, Polish, and Slovak as it emerges from new lexical units known as neologisms. A neologism is defined as a lexical unit that, in relation to existing units in the vocabulary of the contemporary language, is characterized by novelty—both in terms of origin and function (systemic-functional, communicative, stylistic) (Martincová 2017).

The image of women constructed on the basis of neologisms referring to women will be presented against the backdrop of existing linguistic stereotypes associated with women in the studied languages. The goal is to determine to what extent neologisms, as new lexical units, reflect a new image of women and to what extent they reinforce an already established one.

In this paper, I employ semantic and corpus analysis. The material will be analyzed in various semantic categories, e.g. good, evil, illness, health, beauty, ugliness, wisdom, foolishness etc. The material is drawn from the following sources: neologism databases (Neomat for Czech, the Language Observatory),  neologism and colloquial language dictionaries for all three languages, linguistic corpora, website sources.

Preliminary results suggest that neologisms both reproduce stereotypes of women and present new images. An example of a new image can be seen in neologisms relating to mothers (madka in Polish, supermatka in Czech and Slovak – both with negative evaluation), portraying a mother who is excessively committed to her parental duties. However, the imagery differs between Polish and Czech, and Slovak. In Polish, the new form refers to the stereotype of the Matka Polka, and secondarily to madness (from English mad) (Łachnik 2024). In Czech and Slovak, the term evokes characters like Superman (with an ironic meaning).

The study also considers the issue of symmetry with neologisms referring to men. For example, in all the studied Slavic languages, there are symmetrical terms referring to people suffering from alcorexia (alkorektyk, alkorektyczka in Polish; alkorektička, alkorektik in Czech and Slovak). Some neologisms, however, are asymmetrical and lack male counterparts—for instance, the Czech word alkoholka, meaning a girl who drinks too much alcohol.

References:

Kawka, M., Škrabal, M. (2018). Hacknutá čeština, Praha.

Łachnik, J. (2024). O (poza)słowotwórczym charakterze wartościowania. Próba analizy wartościujących negatywnie neologicznych derywatów prostych — na materiale Obserwatorium Językowego UW. In. A C T A U N I V E R S I T A T I S L O D Z I E N S I S FOLIA LINGUISTICA 58(2).

Martincová, M. (2017). NEOLOGISMUS. In: Petr Karlík, Marek Nekula, Jana Pleskalová (eds.), CzechEncy - Nový encyklopedický slovník češtiny.

 Neomat: https://neologismy.cz/o_projektu.php

Obserwatorium Językowe UW: obserwatoriumjezykowe.uw.edu.pl