Ordet kvinna:s semantik

Författare

Anders Agebjörn

Summary, in English

This paper tests the hypothesis, that the Swedish word kvinna ’women’ isn’t used as much in colloquial language as the corresponding word man ’man’. Language users, the hypothesis says, prefer alternative words, such as tjej ’girl’, dam ’lady’, or tant ’aunt’, when they talk about adult persons of female sex which is not the case when they talk about adult persons of male sex. The alternatives to man would be kille ’boy’, herre ’gentlemen’, or gubbe ’old man’. Three different methods are used to test the hypothesis: a dictionary study, a corpus study, and an experiment. The two first studies support the hypothesis, while the result of the experiment is more difficult to interpret and, at least to some extent, refutes the hypothesis. The result of the first study says that the word man has a higher extension than the word kvinna, while the male words pojke, herre, and gubbe have lower extensions than their female equivalents. The second study shows that this condition is more expressed in a
colloquial blogg corpus than in a corpus of more formal texts. The experiment, at last, shows that the word kvinna, just like the word man, to a high degree is used about persons of different appearance and age. However, the construction of the experiment may be questioned.

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