Page 400 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

378 Martin Reisigl

baby”). A special example for sexist diminutive titulation is the German form
of address “Fräulein!” (literally: “little woman”), which refers to an unmarried
woman, in contrast to German “Frau”, which is used for married women. Here,
the discrimination lies in the patriarchal distinction of whether a women is still
“free” for marriage or not, whereas an analogous distinction of unmarried and
married men has not been lexicalized. Similar examples can be found in lan-
guages such as French (“Mademoiselle!”), Spanish (“Senorita!”) or Italian
(“Signorina!”). The analysis of intercultural communication has to take into ac-
count that such sexist nominations are nowadays judged to be politically incor-
rect in some speech communities, whereas there is less linguistic sensitivity for
this sexism in other speech communities.
(3) Syntactic means relating to discriminatory nomination are passivation and
nominalization (see already Sykes 1985: 88–94). They are, strictly speaking,
syntactic means of non-nomination. If a politician claims that “immigration
must be stopped”, those whom the politician wants to be hindered from immi-
grating, i.e. potential immigrants, are callously backgrounded (see below) by
nominalization, and those who the politician wants to reject the immigrants, i.e.
those who make, implement and execute a rigid anti-immigration act, are back-
grounded by passivation.

(4) Numerous semantic means can potentially serve discrimination against
members of specific social groups (see already Sykes 1985: 94–99). Just to men-
tion a few of them: (a) There are various negatively connoted general anthro-
ponyms, e.g. “genderonyms” and “gerontonyms”, such as the sexist German
“Weib”, pejoratively used for “woman”, or the ageist German “Balg” or “Göre”
for English “brat”. (b) “Ethnonyms” are often employed as debasing antonoma-
sias such as “Jude” used in antisemitic idioms like “So ein Jude!”, meaning
“Such a usurious profiteer!”. (c) Synecdochic-metaphoric slurs are frequently
based on the names of more or less tabooed body parts and bodily activities, (e.g.
sexual practices), for instance “asshole”, “cunt”, “motherfucker” and “whore”.
They reduce persons to a socially tabooed part of the body or bodily activity. In
many (though not all) contexts, they become discriminatory nominations. (d)
Animal metaphors are regularly used as insulting swearwords, for instance, “pig/
swine”, “rat”, “parasite” (employed, among others, as antisemitic metaphors by
the Nazis), cow and dog. (e) Proper names are sometimes employed as general-
izing antonomasias, i.e. as appellative nouns. Several examples can be men-
tioned here: (i) A specific first name is used as a debasing antonomastic epithet
for a specific person, for instance, “Heini” or “Susi”; or a specific first name is
used as a collective androcentric antonomasias for a whole social group, for in-
stance, English “Fritz” for all Germans, German “der Ali” for all Turks, or Ger-
man “der Ivan” for all Russians. (ii) A specific first name is used as antonom-
astic antisemitic slur, such as “Judas” denoting “traitor”; or a specific first name