Contextual Sensitivity of the Lexemes Učiteľ [Teacher] and Učiteľka [Female Teacher]

Abstract

Abstract The study deals with the lexical meaning of lexemes female teacher, teacher (male teacher and a generic meaning of the lexeme), which might be in Slovak influenced by context and discourse as well as by attitudes and gender stereotypes of interlocutors. In pragmatic research, the author focuses on semantic indeterminacy as an implicit component of lexical meaning determined by the socialization of interlocutors. Analysis of the lexemes female teacher, teacher and their collocations with the adjectives typical, crazy, burned out, in different contexts, has shown that the gender of the person referred to has an influence on the meaning. The implicit or socialized meaning of the lexemes of the feminine gender is frequently associated with those phenomena that are percieved negatively in society, while the names of the masculine gender do not contain this component.