Women Slandered in Nineteenth Century Sergipe: A Lexical-Semantic Approach to Whore Terminology

Abstract

This paper is an excerpt from our Master’s thesis, the object of which is nineteenth-century verbal offense against women (henceforth VO) in the Northeastern state of Sergipe, Brazi. Our efforts stem from the historical facts that gave context to our corpus, the criminal processes of verbal offense (henceforth CP-VO) and focus on the offensive lexicon from the perspective of social lexicology (MATORÉ, 1953) and cognitive semantics (LAKOFF; JOHNSON, 2002 [1980]). The objective is to present a lexical-semantic analysis of one of the most recurrent VOs in the survey, the epithet puta [derogatory for “female prostitute”], present in five of the ten nineteenth-century Sergipe PC-OVs, the victims of which VOs all being women. The historical context of our study is nineteenth-century Sergipe, which is characterized by patriarchy, stratification and social inequality (NUNES, 2006). This scenario makes it possible to establish a social framework about women and their conditions, imposed by that society (FALCI, 2006). The notion of VO, as a terminology of the lexicon, crosses language and culture as a result of translating the world (BIDERMAN, 2001) and is present in human interactions at all times (SHOEMAKER, 2000). Thus we analyze VO as an offensive lexicon from the perspective of the Idealized Cognitive Models (LAKOFF, 1987) and of the prototypical and categorical constitution (ROSCH, 1978).