Deontic Meaning and Pragmatics of Politically Correct Renaming

Abstract

The analysis is carried out against the background of conceptions of deontic meaning as a basic concept to analyze social evaluation of lexis. As first introduced by Fritz Hermanns, the term deontic meaning is considered as part of the lexical meaning of some words and expressions on par with their descriptive meaning that appeals to the stances of the recipients. The paper presumes that deontic meanings refer to the prescriptive usage of a linguistic form and its positive or negative deontics pointing to whether something may (not) or ought (not) to be used in certain contexts. In this framework the deontic meaning of the word is studied in the perspective of political correctness and politically correct language. The analysis shows an explanatory force of the concept deontic meaning as an analytical tool for investigating the social embeddedness of a linguistic form, and contributes to understanding linguistic processes generated by political correctness. This paper, first, reveals the key notions central to understanding political correctness as aiming to redress injustices in matters such as race, nation, gender, sexual orientation in the modern (Anglo)-American and German types of discourse. Second, the paper aims to discuss the relationship between denotative meaning, connotation and deontic meaning in explaining the meaning making process in contextualization. The analysis is in line with theoretical and methodological approaches in modern discourse linguistics, discourse analysis, and pragmatically oriented linguistics. Empirical material for the study is provided by the texts reflecting current socio-cultural situations in Western Europe and in the USA in 2019-2023. The actual cases show that in the politically correct naming practices there is a trend for the formation of a deontic meaning. In fact, what is observed is not an alternative nomination, but a reduction of the possible polysemy of meanings to one dominant interpretation and one meaning. The mechanism of the deontic meaning formation acts as socially determined. The analysis shows such situations in which political correctness actually has been transformed into a struggle with hidden meanings potentially derived by the addressee.