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380 Martin Reisigl

(a) “collectivization”, i.e. the nomination of social actors by collectives or
mass nouns (e.g. “the crowd”), or
(b) “aggregation”, i.e. the statistical quantification of groups of participants
(e.g. “10,000 are too many”), and
(3) “impersonalization”, i.e. the nomination of persons as if they were not really
human beings, which can be realized by
(a) “abstraction”, i.e. the representation of social actors by means of a
quality assigned to them (e.g. “the unskilled”, “illegals”), or
(b) “objectivation”, i.e. the nomination of persons by means of reference to
a place or object (e.g. by metonymies like “the foreign countries”) (Van
Leeuwen 1996: 47–59).

There are myriads of lexicalized discriminatory anthroponyms in any language
which are employed as discriminatory nominations in different social fields
and subfields of action such as policy and politics, economy, religion, military,
science, education, sexuality, housing, media, health service, arts, etc. Many
of them are tropes, and especially metaphors, metonymies and synecdoches
(including antonomasias). They cannot be discussed in the present chapter (for
a selection of such anthroponyms, see Reisigl and Wodak 2001: 48–52; for
discriminating metaphors, see also El Refaie 2001). Whether a specific anthro-
ponym has a discriminatory effect or not, is, in concrete casas, determined by
the pragmatic context or co-text.

5.2. Discrimination by predication

The second discourse analytical aspect of verbal discrimination I want to selec-
tively focus on relates to predication strategies employed to discriminate against
people by ascribing debasing traits, characteristics, qualities and features to
them. Such predications are usually connected with social prejudices and
stereotypes – the latter being understood as fixed, uniform, reductionist, over-
generalizing schemes or schematic modi operandi which are mostly acquired by
socialization, are frequently distributed via mass media and show a high degree
of recognizability (see Reisigl in print).
Discriminatory predications in discourses are linguistically or visually more
or less explicit or implicit and – like nomination and argumentation – specific or
vague. Predicational strategies are mainly realized by specific forms of nomi-
nation (based on explicit denotation as well as on more or less implicit conno-
tation), by attributes (in the form of adjectives, appositions, prepositional
phrases, relative clauses, conjunctional clauses, infinitive clauses and participial
clauses or groups), by predicates or predicative nouns/adjectives/pronouns, by
collocations, by explicit comparisons, similes, metaphors and other rhetorical
figures (including metonymies, hyperboles, litotes, euphemisms) and by more