OBESITY in Colloquial Polish. Inventory Research Project

Abstract

This article is an overview of a project that aims to study the way in which colloquial Polish is used to verbalise the state of being obese. The innovation of this project is the attempt to comprehensively study the problem by including both how being obese is evaluated from the perspective of slim people and the individual experience of people who are obese. Rather than speaking, the obese are usually spoken of (by slim people). There is a dominant group of slim people that draws up the conditions of discourse, enacts symbolic violence against obese people, and imposes a particular way of verbalising the state of being obese. This project is intended to overcome this dominance, aiming to not only study texts that are authored by slim people, but also give the floor to obese people, with the aim of objectivising the phenomenon. The problem of verbalising obesity is contemporaneous and emotionally biased. The significant progress in elucidating the causes and consequences of obesity that has taken place over the last two decades has not led to a change in the perception of obesity in colloquial language. In the common consciousness of Polish speakers, an obese person disturbs the culturally established sense of aesthetics of a human body. Obese people are perceived as alien, worse, uglier, lazy, less intelligent, and incongruous when compared with the ideal image of people who are healthy, lean, and successful. The project envisions excerpting lexemes and metaphors used to describe obesity from dictionaries, fiction, public discourse (periodicals, TV programmes), and interviews with obese people. The result of the work will be an inventory – a database with a specific template for describing a unit. An important part of each unit will be information on the axiological and semantic features of the lexemes and metaphors presented in the form of a thematic category code. The project is based on the cognitive theory of metaphor of G. Lakoff, the method of removal of metaphors from text of B. Fatyga and P. Zieliński, the theory of cognitive definition of J. Bartmiński, and the method of studying the personal language of values of J. Puzynina.