“…this is teenage bitchiness” : A corpus-based study of teenagers’ use of the term bitch and its forms

Sammanfattning: So far little research has been done on the term bitch exclusively. The aim of this essay is to find a pattern of teenagers’ uses of the word bitch in various contexts and in different grammatical forms. A further question is whether bitch can be considered a swearword or not. The investigation was carried out by using two different corpora which is COLT (The Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language) and Webcorp as the primary sources out of which concordance lines were extracted. These were in turn categorized into different word classes and analyzed in detail. The results show that there were several word classes in which bitch appeared such as noun, verb and adjective and the most common word class is nouns. The results also show that teenagers mainly use the term as a swearword with which they address their peers. In conclusion even though the term bitch did not originally belong to taboo language, however, due to the fact that the word has developed a more negative meaning it can be seen a swearword.