SerBoCroatian marriage verbs in queer contexts

Thesis

The present paper examines marriage verbs in SerBoCroatian (BCMS+) in contexts pertaining to same-sex couples. Marriage verbs in BCMS+ have gendered subcategorisations for their arguments, rooted in traditional heteronormative marriage. With the advent of civil partnerships in the Western Balkans, the question arises how frame same-sex unions can be framed using these verbs. How does this relate to speakers' identities and attitudes toward LGBT+ people? To investigate this, this paper used a web-based acceptability task, filled out by 107 native speakers. The results were analysed using categorisation trees. Results showed that attitudes toward the LGBT+ community as well as prescriptivist ideologies are key factors in the acceptability of non-normative marriage verb uses. There is, however, also a clear linguistic effect whereby non-normative subjects are much less acceptable than non-normative objects, perhaps an artefact of processing differences between the two.}

Authors: Helmrich, FM

• Alternative title: An experimental study in Sociolinguistics
• Type of award: MPhil taught course
• Level of award: Masters
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Croatian; marriage; judgement task; verbs; LGBT; sociolinguistics; Serbocroatian; same-sex marriage; likert scale; queer; Bosnian; acceptability; Serbian; variation; BCMS
• Subjects: Linguistics, Experimental