Researching English VocabularySwearing Presentation

By Ana, Jose, Maria and Stephen

The word we will be presenting is….

Word formation processes

• Inflection• Derivation

• Compounding

Words with similar functions

Etymology

Old English “bicce”

Germanic only in Old Norse “bikkja“

German “betze “and “petze”

French “biche” “bitch,” and “biche”

?

The most frequent collocation is “son of a bitch”

The collocation “Stuck up bitch” means, a girl or a women who is generally ugly and thinks she is

better than everyone else.

Analysing Google Ngram Viewer: British English

Analysing Google Ngram Viewer: American English

Comparing English and American use

• The uses were very similar except that ‘bitch’ was used more often in British English to describe abstract items.

• The form ‘biatch’ did not appear in the British English corpus on ngram viewer.

• The use of the word ‘bitch’ has peaked in the last 10 years in both British and American English.

Genres in which “bitch” appears

• Highest frequency in the fictional register• In the magazine and spoken registers there is a higher frequency as well in contrast with the newspaper and

academic registers • Possible explanation in fictional register : informal style• The low frequency in the academic and newspaper registers is because these registers use a more formal style

and their aim is to transmit information or explain something.

Corpus of Historical American English

• The highest frequency appears in the year 2000 • Other higher frequencies appear between the years 1960 and 1970.• Conclusion: the word “bitch” became to be a more used word from

1950 in spite of the slight differences across the 20th century.

References

• The Corpus Of Contemporary American English, http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/• Corpus of Historical American English, http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/• Oxford English Dictionary, http://www.oed.com/• Sketch Engine, http://www.sketchengine.co.uk/

Thank you for watching!