https://doi.org/10.31261/TPDJP.2012.21.07
The article contributes to the reconstruction of the linguistic stereotype of a young man who is “in between” – no longer a child, but not yet an adult. Based on an analysis of responses to a survey completed by middle school students in southern Poland, the author shows how young people understand the meaning of the words boy and young man, what defining characteristics they consider distinctive, and what terms they use to define their peers.
The results of the study indicate a peculiar distortion of the worldview, manifested in subjectivity and incompleteness. The choice of a specific superordinate term (human, person, man, male, teenager, friend, crush) determined the initial categorization and greatly influenced the (more or less conscious) judgment of the sender of the message.
Respondents clearly distinguished between the lexemes: boyfriend as a “young man” and boy as a “male child (younger than a boyfriend)”. They most often referred to a person their own age as a boyfriend, avoiding the diminutive-sounding boy. One of the main differentiating elements was the age difference attributed to both terms, as indicated in the definitions.
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Vol. 21 (2012)
Published: 2012-12-31
10.31261/TPDJP
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
English
Język Polski