1.1 Motivation and the Issue
Expletives play an important role in a culture. How these words come into existence can inform us about the social and historical backgrounds of a culture. In addition, as a part of the language, these words may inevitably go through linguistic changes (e.g., amelioration), which usually involve various social and cultural factors as well. For instance, English expletive bitch, according to Collin (1984), has had a colorful and busy past. The main meaning of this word is “female animal, particularly a canine.” It became applicable to a human female, which highlights the similarity in sexual behavior of human and nonhuman beings, with the underlying cultural value of Christian morality.
Similar to English bitch, in Chinese, we also have an expletive for degrading females, which is called 婊子 biǎozi, an expression highlighting the sexual behavior of an immoral female and showing the similar value that women should be moral. What is different from English, however, is that the semantic development of 婊子 biǎozi involves a more complex spatial metaphor and culture-specific value in terms of human relationships in Chinese culture. According to Xu (2011), the expression 婊子 biǎozi is originally written as 表子 biǎozi, which refers to “a concubine or a secret lover.” This phenomenon arouses our interests since the word 表 biǎo, which is commonly used as a spatial term denoting “outer, outside, or surface,” is used in the domain of human relationships. On the other hand, Hu (2016) provides a detailed diachronic linguistic study. He indicates how the expression goes through reanalysis and gradually changes from a neutral term 表子 biǎozi ‘a concubine or a secret lover’ to a degrading term.
However, neither Xu (2011) nor Hu (2016) provides further explanations for how and why people use 表子 biǎozi to refer to ‘a concubine or a secret lover’. Therefore, we
found a research gap in investigating the semantic development and semantic change from the word 表 biǎo to the expletive 婊 biǎo, which involves culture-specific value as well as a series of steps of semantic change.
The semantic change, however, does not reach an end. When we look up the expletive 婊 biǎo in the Online Dictionary from the Ministry of Education (henceforth ODMOE), we can find two definitions, as shown in (1). The first definition is “a prostitute,” in (1a) and the second one is “an expletive to female” in (1b).
(1) a. 俗稱 以 性交易 為業 的 女子。
súchēng yǐ xìngjiāoyì wéiyè de nǚzǐ
‘Usually refers to a prostitute’
b. 俗 以為 辱罵 女人 的 粗話，
sú yǐwéi rǔmà nǚrén de cūhuà
含 貶義。
hán biǎnyì
‘An expletive to females, with a degrading sense’
Nonetheless, it will be anomalous if we use the two definitions above to interpret (2) and (3) below, which are found in an online forum called PTT.
(2) 每到 夜深人靜 的 此時 正是 每個
měidào yèshēnrénjìng de cǐshí zhèngshì měigè
公主 嗷嗷待哺 的 時候 (自婊 無誤 XDD)
gōngzhǔ áoáodàibǔ de shíhòu zìbiǎo wúwù
‘Every night at this moment, every princess is waiting for someone to buy late-night supper for them. (I’ m just teasing at myself XDD)’ (from PTT corpus)
(3) 整天 住 別人 家 整天 發勞騷
zhěngtiān zhù biérén jiā zhěngtiān fāláosāo
整天 耍 婊
zhěngtiān shuǎ biǎo
‘…lives in other people’ s houses, keeps complaining about everything, and plays underhanded tricks all day long…’ (from PTT corpus)
These two examples indicate that 婊 biǎo has gone through a semantic change and develops as a polysemous word, whose senses should be inferred from different contexts. Moreover, 婊 biǎo in today’s usage serves as different syntactic categories.
For instance, apart from (2) and (3), we can find expressions such as 婊人 biǎorén, 自 婊zìbiǎo, and 很婊 hěnbiǎo in the Internet forum. In addition, it seems that 婊 biǎo as a verb form is less negative than 婊 biǎo as a nominal form, especially when speakers want to tease at themselves, as (2) shows.
The linguistic phenomena mentioned above have not been discussed in previous studies, nor have dictionaries and Chinese Wordnet recorded the newly emerging meanings and expressions of 婊 biǎo. Therefore, the present paper aims to provide a detailed analysis of the semantic development of the expletive 婊 biǎo, within the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics.
1.2 Research Questions
We have pointed out several important points in previous sections about the semantic change and the issue of the newly-emerging polysemous 婊 biǎo. To explore the linguistic phenomena, we will focus on the following three research questions.
(i) How many senses does the newly-emerging polysemous 婊 biǎo have?
(ii) What mechanisms are involved during the semantic change of the word?
(iii) What can we infer from the semantic prosody of the word during the semantic change?
1.3 Organization of the Thesis
The thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the thesis. In Chapter 2, we introduce the theoretical frameworks and three studies on semantic change of expletives—the English one bitch and the Chinese one 婊子 biǎozi. Chapter 3 introduces the methodology, including how we collect and categorize our data.
Chapter 4 presents the analysis on the senses of the newly-emerging 婊 biǎo as well as the diachronic and synchronic semantic change of 婊 biǎo, where we also provide explanations for semantic change and the semantic networks of the word. Chapter 5 discusses some implications from the semantic change of the word, including cultural issues, semantic prosody of the word, and how it is used in two different registers—the online forum PPT and newspapers. Finally, Chapter 6 provides a conclusion and suggestions for future studies.