Name(less)-Based Stereotypes and Strategies of Name Bias in Corpus-Assisted Literary Socio-Onomastics: Anti-Roma Prejudices in the Romanian Novel of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Name(less)-Based Stereotypes and Strategies of Name Bias in Corpus-Assisted Literary Socio-Onomastics: Anti-Roma Prejudices in the Romanian Novel of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Summary/Abstract: This study provides an interdisciplinary approach to name bias and name-based discrimination against Roma. It aims at bringing together corpus-assisted onomastics, corpus linguistics techniques and the methodology of corpus-assisted discourse studies via a corpus-assisted discourse-historical approach. In addition, considering that the corpus employed for this investigation consists of literary texts, the theoretical-methodological novelty of this article also lies in advocating for a literary socio-onomastic approach. More specifically, the present analysis investigates the impact of literature in reinforcing anti-Roma discrimination, employing more than 1,200 Romanian novels published between 1845 and 1947 of the DMRN archive. The legitimization of this approach lies in exploring how specific functions of fictional names not only encompass the aversion towards Roma by reproducing it at the literary discourse, but also further intensify stereotyping and reinforce prejudices. Thus, advocating for a sociolinguistic perspective on literary discourse through the DHA, this analysis relied on a dictionary-assisted corpus compilation. Selecting twelve ethnophaulisms registered for the Roma ethnicity and using pdfgrep for lexical searches in 1,239 PDF files were followed by a manual extraction of all personal names encountered for Roma characters. Frequency analysis and initial descriptive statistics reveal three strategies of name bias present in a century of Romanian literature: stereotyping Roma characters through anonymization; stigmatizing them by pairing anthroponyms with ethnophaulisms and exoticized professionyms; and discriminating them via the onymization of derogatory appellatives.

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