Tracing the Use of Bisexual in Contemporary American English: A Corpus-based Study

Abstract

[eng] Queer Studies and Linguistics have paid close attention to several lexical items enclosed in the LGBT+ group, such as gay or lesbian. However, bisexuality has either been overlooked or faced with prejudice from both inside and outside the LGBT+ community, often being described as transphobic or exclusively binary. Despite the negative reading, this label has a long history of evolution and change that might explain its current denotation and connotation, but which remains largely underexplored. In order to partially fill in this gap, this dissertation studies the term bisexual in a 560-million-word corpus of contemporary American English – COCA, which covers the period 1990-2017 – with the aim of uncovering the speakers’ unconscious associations of this concept. A total of 1,935 occurrences of the word were carefully analysed according to grammatical and semantic criteria and entered into a database with the aim of profiling the recent use of the term. The different connotations attached to bisexual from 1990 to 2017 are, then, interpreted as related to different changes in the social context.