The Lexical Semantics of Social Categories: Demonyms and Occupation Words in English

Abstract

First and foremost, this thesis is an exploration of the lexical semantics of selected English social category words, using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). It will explicate two sets of social category words, identify commonalities between the explications, and in turn identify sub-classes based upon the shared semantic structures. A subsidiary goal is to explore the syntactic and phraseological properties of each subclass, using online corpora and journals and newspapers from a variety of sources. The three corpora are the British National Corpus–Brigham Young University, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, 2004-, and Davies, 2008-, respectively), and Collins Wordbanks Online. The question of interest is the extent to which the syntactic and phraseological properties of human social category words can be accounted for by their semantic properties. The thesis makes no attempt to focus on any one particular dialect of English. It generally draws on written English from Australian, British and American sources; however, if it becomes apparent that there are strong differences between these dialects, these differences will be mentioned.