The goal of this small sample study is to explore what possible effects a political situation and the ideologization of public discourse may have on language and its lexis. Using two corpora, one composed of the 1952, 1969 and 1977 texts characterizing the totalitarian language of the former Czechoslovakia and the other based on contemporary texts, the study compares the seven most frequent collocates of seven selected lemmas (four nouns and three adjectives) found in the Totality corpus and the control contemporary language corpus. The comparison shows that longterm use of ideologically motivated word combinations may influence the associative semantic component of otherwise neutral words and result in change of their semantic prosody, or at least in abuse of their prosody. Hence the delimitation of a totalitarian discourse vocabulary must take into account not only ideologically marked lexis, but also the syntagmatic aspects of the discourse.
The paper deals with intensifying (expletive) insertion reminiscent of infixation (debatable in English). The inserted intensifiers placed inside the base are (unlike infixes) free morphemes producing what have been called “un-bloody-likely” words which contravene the presumably universally valid uninterruptibility criterion defining the word. The paper, drawing on literature, web search and the analysis of a sample of attested intensified words (Vojtěch 2019), describes the properties of the base and the intensifier (expletive) and the principles governing the placement of the intensifier.
JavaScript jest wyłączony w Twojej przeglądarce internetowej. Włącz go, a następnie odśwież stronę, aby móc w pełni z niej korzystać.