Zoosemy and Gender Stereotyping: A Corpus Analysis of Six Pairs of English and Croatian Lexemes

The aim of this paper is to analyse particular examples of zoosemy, i.e. animal lexemes that we figuratively use in order to refer to humans, in both Croatian and English. The paper focuses on six pairs of animal lexemes belonging to the category of pets, farm animals, and wild animals, and strives to investigate whether the gender of the referent impacts the frequency of their use in a negative sense. It also attempts to present potential motivational factors that underlie the construction of different figurative meanings. The data was gathered from two largest corpora of Croatian and English, and compared cross-linguistically. The results showed that speakers tend to direct derogatory zoosems at female addressees more often than male, and that the use of the lexemes depends on different cognitive and socio-cultural models, as well as many contextual factors