The language of discrimination

Language is one of the main ways that discrimination is enacted. In the discourse of discrimination there is a set of key words that denote the processes of prejudice. This book discusses the lexical semantics of this field of words and how, as a cognitive process, they underlie insults, hate speech, slurs, derogatory phrases, terms of abuse and other linguistic acts of discrimination. Stollznow presents a semantic analysis employing reductive paraphrase, using data sourced from naturally occurring examples and corpora. Relevant semantic phenomena are also examined, such as synonymy, polysemy, metaphor, euphemism and dysphemism, semantic shift, pejoration, amelioration and reclamation. This book examines the way people enact racism, sexism, ageism and other forms of discrimination in language.