“They’re dumb, not stupid.” : A Corpus Study on the Language on Stupidity in American English

Abstract

This master’s thesis studied the use of four evaluative adjectives with senses denoting a lack of intelligence, stupid, dumb, foolish, and retarded in informal American English. The first of three research questions concerned prominent features of the words in the data. The second research question concerned the near-synonymity and variance of these words, and the third research question concerned the presence of evaluation and attitude in language containing one or more of these words. Theoretical notions on insults, semantics, and evaluative language were used to form a basis for the analysis. Basic notions on corpus linguistics were provided, as the language data formed from television and film subtitles was retrieved from the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Three dictionary entries were used as supplementary material for comparison in the discussion of the second research question. The main methods were the analysis and comparison of the 30 most frequent collocates of the adjectives and concordance lines of those collocations. The collocational data showed both similarities and differences between the adjectives. Among the collocates of the adjectives, only the words thing and girl were shared by all four. All adjectives had varying numbers of collocates specific to them, and of those collocates shared by two or more adjectives, different collocates were found to prefer one of the adjectives to varying degrees. Regarding the second question, the four adjectives were found to behave as either near-synonyms or variants situationally. Similarly, the evaluations and attitudes the words were found to express also varied situationally, though the presence of repetition or synonymy appears to aid in specifying this. Furthermore, it was suggested that such expressions are found more offensive in interrogative form.