Evaluative Language in Academic Discourse: Euphemisms vs. Dysphemisms in Adrews' & Kalpakli's "The Age of Beloveds" (2005) as a case in point

Abstract

In this article, I am concerned with certain aspects of the language use in ANDREWS and KALPAKLI’s The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (2005). More specifically, I show how the authors tend to use distinct sets of words to describe a particular kind of practice depending on whether it occurs in the Ottoman Empire or in some western European city, even though they claim that the practices are equivalent. Typically, the practice in question involves an adult male, a young dependent boy, a sexual act between the two, and some kind of payment for the boy. This kind of practice is more often than not referred to in terms of activities of love when it occurs in the Ottoman Empire, but in terms of sexual debauchery involving boy prostitutes when it takes place in some western European city. Thus, in the article, in which I draw on certain insights from Critical Discourse Analysis (see, e.g., REISIGL and WODAK 2001), I show, by means of several quotations, that the vocabulary used to describe the practices is quite frequently euphemistic when the Ottoman Empire is concerned and correspondingly dysphemistic when cities in Western Europe are concerned. The subtitle of the work represents an exception to this pattern.I conclude the article by pointing out two issues that might shed some light on the authors’ choice of words.Keywords: evaluative language in academic discourse, euphemism, dysphemism, Ottoman lyric poetry, Ottoman Turkish language, early-modern cultural studies