Tierische Maledicta in der linguistischen Forschung
Animal Maledicta in Linguistic Research

Summary/Abstract: Swear words and insults were largely overlooked in linguistic research for a long time. It was not until the second half of the 20th century that there was a greater focus on this subject in academic circles. It is worth noting that the subject has been covered in lexicographical works since the 18th century. One example worth mentioning here is the publication „Die Nürnberger Schimpfwörter bildlich dargestellt“ by A.[mbrosius] Gabler (c. 1795). In this context, the monograph „Tierische Personenschimpfwörter imDeutschen und im Polnischen – Semantische und funktionale Aspekte“ by Aleksandra Kamińska deserves particular attention. The author uses slang dictionaries and general dictionaries published between 1964 and 2018 as a corpus for a comprehensive contrastive study of the German-Polish language pair. The main focus of the study is on animal-based swear words, i.e. swear words containing animal elements, predominantly drawn from the realm of domestic and farm animals. This concerns, on the one hand, the prevalence of personal insults in quantitative terms, and, on the other hand, their meaning and usage in both languages. The findings gathered by the researcher reveal a significant disparity in the number of linguistic units examined in German and Polish, which can be explained, among other things, by the number of available dictionaries containing swear words. According to Kamińska, from a semantic and pragmatic perspective, differences of varying degrees can be identified in terms of consistency (or lack thereof) in the definition of terms, reference to individuals and collectives, and gender and age markers in animal-based personal insults. The analyses carried out are characterised by a high level of detail and thus provide significant insights. The study is particularly valuable because of its comprehensive and in-depth nature. This provides a complete insight into the linguistic characteristics of the field in question. The chosen research perspective also provides important insights into issues related to lexicology, lexicography, word-formation morphology and phraseology. Another key benefit of the study lies in its cultural context, which is of great importance for understanding in interlingual communication situations.

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