Original scientific paper
Reflections of Antihuman Reality
Edita Hercigonja-Mikšik
orcid.org/0000-0002-6736-711X
; University of Zagreb, Faculty of Philosophy, Zagreb
Abstract
From the prehistoric era to the present day, human actions have been marked by violence. With time, the ways and means used by men to enslave, kill, humiliate and deceive members of their own kind have become deadlier and more ingenious. Language, as the container and transmitter of human experience, knowledge and social exchange, marks the entire human reality, often concealing its destructive facet. The witnesses to this are dictionaries, where facts, as well as discourses used to obscure them, are stored. At the lexical level, these are most often various euphemisms, dysphemisms, metaphors and metonyms. At the level of discourse, these are circumlocutions, notion redefinitions and mystifying dabblings with linguistic signs, which mirror a dehumanized, and moreover, an antihuman reality. This paper explores, states and comments on lexical examples and discourses which reveal linguistic and socioanthropological dimensions of the violent constant of human nature.
Keywords
euphemisms; lingvistic manipulation; dehumanization; antihumanism; socolinguistic
Hrčak ID:
200698
URI
Publication date:
28.5.2018.
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