РОССИЙСКИЙ УНИВЕРСИТЕТ ДРУЖБЫ НАРОДОВ
Институт иностранных языков
Кафедра теории и практики иностранных языков
УТВЕРЖДАЮ
Зав. кафедрой теории и практики иностранных языков
______________к.ф.н., профессор Н.Л.Соколова
«______»_______________2014 г.
КУРСОВАЯ РАБОТА
на тему
Politically correct speech and its peculiarities
035700.68 – Лингвистика
магистр лингвистики по направлению Лингвистика
Разработчик
Студент группы МВ 304 (3 КУРС)
Студенческий билет № 1032115820
Гуцу Мариана Григоривна
«______»_______________2014 г.
Руководитель
к.ф.н., доцент, кафедра теории и практики иностранных языков
_____________________О.Г.Аносова
Москва 2014
Content
Introduction……………………………………………………. 3
The historical roots of “Political correctness”……………….7
3. Aspects of PC language: sensitive topics………………….11
The list of PC language vocabulary……………………….16
Conclusion………………………………………………..20
Introduction
The debates on Political Correctness (PC) provoked a very useful result in the last fifteen years, particularly for magazine and newspaper editors, publishing houses and many authors, famous and less famous, who all have contributed in some way to make it an important subject.
In French, the equivalent term is “politiquement correct”; in German – politisch korrekt; in Russian it is rendered by “политкорректность”, while the Italians call it “politicamente corretto”. We have a lot of variants for it but they all miss the original meaning, as the term “politic” only refers to politics, and never to language. The connotative element related to the politicization of language is not obvious in Romanian. In an attempt to satirize political correctness exaggerations in language use, the Japanese have chosen a functional type of translation, using the term "kotobagari" (meaning “word hunting”)[1].
It is not possible here to illustrate all the details, also because the phenomenon PC is really a compound of a series of issues not all of which seem to be interconnected.
The topic of this research is how political correctness influences the modern society and how it appeared. One cannot help noticing, that this topic is rather interesting and urgent nowadays. Political correctness, in short, has gone a long way in the past fifteen years. From a minor side effect of society, it has gradually evolved into an overarching, ever-present and omnipotent buzz-word at which everyone shivers. The word is today dominated by an alien system of beliefs, attitudes and values that we have come to know as “Political Correctness.”
The concept of political correctness has been written about extensively over the decades and has been in popular discussion in the U.S. for at least 20 to 30 years.
According to specialists, political correctness - is term which refers to language, ideas, policies or behavior seen as seeking to minimize social and institutional offense in such categories as occupation, gender, race, culture, sexual orientation, disability or age-related contexts .
In other words, to be politically correct means to be hypersensitive to the degree that no one in these categories perceives in any small way that he or she is being singled out, slighted or characterized in any unpleasant or uncomplimentary fashion. It has really picked up steam, becoming far too overbearing. For instance, it is not fair to call fat people fat, we have to call them overweight, horizontally challenged . We can't call short people short, we have to call them vertically challenged . It gets better. We aren't allowed to do certain activities because it is unfair to people. Political correctness has evolved to far more than just this.
The object of the following research is lexical methods of representation political correctness phenomenon in language and investigation the impact of political correctness on everyday speech.
The subject of the research is to find out how political correctness was formed in speech, what favored the development of the phenomenon, what historical events preceded its forthcoming.
The aim of the research is to understand the sense of the phenomenon of PC and to find out the use of it in language and speech; to find the information on what PC language and its historical origin, to create a list of PC language, to present some fitting activities on the subject.
According to the aim of this research we can mark out the following tasks:
1) to describe the political correctness phenomenon;
2) to expose regular occurrence and special characteristics of political correctness; 3) to examine its functioning in language and speech;
4) to compare it with other lexical phenomena and its influence on modern society;
5) to characterize and classify political correctness units.