Definition of slang

Introduction

 
The interest of researchers for different types of profanity, 
especially for such a specific, as slang, has always existed

And it is understandable, since slang attracts by its metaphors, 
expressiveness and "nontraditional" category: "Slang is 
used in stylistic purposes: to create the effect of novelty, 
unusual, different from the accepted samples for transmission 
a certain mood of the speaker, to give utterance 
concreteness, vividness, visibility, accuracy, brevity, imagery, and 
it helps  to avoid cliches. "

At the same slang is "an integral part of any advanced natural language, which arises as an inevitable consequence of the codification of a national language. Slang ... is the most dynamic layer of lexical-semantic system of language and it updates very quickly, so it is in concentrated form the basic concepts, a sort of linguistic ground on which many of the new language elements are validated , and then partially are digested by the standard, literary language "[Voloshin, 2000: 10 ].

There is no unequivocal relation to a question of use of a slang in various styles of speech. All this caused a need of a complex studying of a slang on a material of several languages, including English and Russian in order to promote an increase of language competence speaking, cultural development of speech and feeling of communicative expediency of the use of language means in various spheres of communication. This determines the relevance of our research.

Slang has bright national linguistic and social characteristics and is commonly used in works of fiction to create a color and image characteristics of the character.

The goal of the given course paper is:

On the basis of description of the pragmatic, functional,  semantic and fiction features elements of reduced vocabulary in English and Russian languages ​​to establish  the specific ways of transferring the equivalent  lexical elements in the translation.

Major  Research Findings: With the help of the following objectives the author will achieve the main goal of the course paper: 

1. To  describe the place of slang in the lexical structure of Russian and English languages ​​and to give a classification of its basic types. 
2. To describe the functional specification of slang and to show its role in a literary text. 
3. To analyze specific cases of transmission of the equivalent reduced vocabulary in the English-Russian translation of the examples taken from the works of D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye." 
4. To classify the main ways of slang translation.

The actual language material for the analysis and description was selected by continuous sampling of the works of contemporary fiction, dictionaries, Russian and English (general and special). In total about 50 English examples were picked up from D. Salinger's work "The Catcher in the Rye", and also specialized dictionaries were used.

In the analysis of examples of lexical transformations, and also of the methods of the contextual, semantic, morphological and word-formation analysis, a method of the comparative description was used.

  Work consists of introduction, theoretical and practical parts, the conclusion, the appendix and the list of the used literature.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1.2 Definition of slang

 

Every adult speaker has a concept of slang--knowing at the least that some words and expressions transgress generally accepted norms of formality or appropriateness and in some way do not fit the measure of what "good" language is. Despite such recognition by almost all speakers, scholars with formal training in linguistic analysis have almost ignored slang--though they acknowledge having the same intuitions about this type of vocabulary as do all speakers. In truth, most linguists have given no more thought to slang than have people who claim no expertise in language. In the English-speaking world in particular, the description of the form and function of slang has been left largely to lexicographers rather than to others who study language for a living.

Webster’s "Third New International Dictionary" gives the following definition of the term slang:

1. Language peculiar to a particular group as:

a) the special and often secret vocabulary used by a class (as thieves, beggars) and usually felt to be vulgar or inferior: argot;

b) the jargon used by or associated with a particular trade, profession, or field of activity.

2. A non-standard vocabulary composed of words and senses characterized primary by connotations of extreme informality and usually a currency not limited to a particular region and composed typically of coinages or arbitrarily changed words, clipped or shortened forms, extravagant, forced or facetious figures of speech, or verbal novelties usually experiencing quick popularity and relatively rapid decline into disuse.

The "New Oxford English Dictionary" defines slang as follows:

a) the special vocabulary used by any set of persons of a low or disreputable character; language of a low and vulgar type;

b) the cant or jargon of a certain class or period;

c) language of a highly colloquial type considered as below the level of standard educated speech, and consisting either of new words or of current words employed in some special sense."

As it is seen from these quotations slang is represented both as a special vocabulary and as a special language. This causes confusion. If this is a certain lexical layer, than why should it be given the rank of language or a dialect of even a patois, and then it should be characterized not only by its peculiar use of words but also by phonetic, morphological and syntactical peculiarities.

In general all linguists agree that slang is nonstandard vocabulary composed of words or senses characterized primarily by connotations of extreme informality and usually by a currency not limited to a particular region. It is composed typically of coinages or arbitrarily changed words, clipped or shortened forms, extravagant, forced, or facetious figures of speech, or verbal novelties. They are identified and distinguished by contrasting them to standard literary vocabulary. They are expressive, mostly ironical words serving to create fresh names for some things that are frequent topics of discourse.1

Slang consists of the words and expressions that have escaped from the cant, jargon and argot (and to a lesser extent from dialectal, nonstandard, and taboo speech) of specific subgroups of society so that they are known and used by an appreciable percentage of the general population, even though the words and expressions often retain some associations with the subgroups that originally used and popularized them. Thus, slang is a middle ground for words and expressions that have become too popular to be any longer considered as part of the more restricted categories, but that are not yet (and may never become) acceptable or popular enough to be considered informal or standard. (Compare the slang "hooker" and the standard "prostitute.")

Slang fills a necessary niche in all languages. It can serve as a bridge or a barrier, either helping both old and new words that have been used as "insiders' " terms by a specific group of people to enter the language of the general public or, on the other hand, preventing them from doing so. Thus, for many words, slang is a testing ground that finally proves them to be generally useful, appealing, and acceptable enough to become standard or informal. For many other words, slang is a testing ground that shows them to be too restricted in use, not as appealing as standard synonyms, or unnecessary, frivolous, faddish, or unacceptable for standard or informal speech. For still a third group of words and expressions, slang becomes not a final testing ground that either accepts or rejects them for general use but becomes a vast limbo, a permanent holding ground, an area of speech that a word never leaves

Slang words cannot be distinguished from other words by sound or meaning. In fact, most slang words are homonyms of standard words, spelled and pronounced just like their standard counterparts, as for example slang words for money such as beans, brass, dibs, dough, chinc, oof, wards; the slang synonyms for word head are attic, brain-pan, hat peg, nut, upper storey; drunk- boozy, cock-eyed, high, soaked, tight, and pot (marijuana). Of course, these words are alike in their ordinary standard use and in their slang use. Each word sounds just as appealing or unappealing, dull or colorful in its standard as in its slang use. Also, the meanings of beans and money, head and attic, pot and marijuana are the same, so it cannot be said that the connotations of slang words are any more colorful or racy than the meanings of standard words.2

All languages, countries, and periods of history have slang. This is true because they all have had words with varying degrees of social acceptance and popularity.

The same linguistic processes are used to create and popularize slang as are used to create and popularize all other words. That is, all words are created and popularized in the same general ways; they are labeled slang only according to their current social acceptance, long after creation and popularization.

To fully understand slang, one must remember that a word's use, popularity, and acceptability can change. Words can change in social level, moving in any direction. Thus, some standard words of William Shakespeare's day are found only in certain modern-day British dialects. Words that are taboo in one era (e.g., stomach, thigh) can become accepted, standard words in a later era. Many prove either useful enough to become accepted as standard or informal words or too faddish for standard use. Blizzard and okay have become standard, while conbobberation ("disturbance") and tomato ("girl") have been discarded. Some words and expressions have a lasting place in slang; for instance, beat it ("go away"), first used in the 16th century, has neither become Standard English nor vanished.

Language is dynamic, and at any given time hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of words and expressions are in the process of changing from one level to another, of becoming more acceptable or less acceptable, of becoming more popular or less popular.

Slang is very informal use of words and phrases for more colorful or peculiar style of expression that is shared by the people in the same social subgroup, for example, computer slang, sports slang, military slang, musicians’ slang, students’ slang, underworld slang, etc. Slang is not used by the majority of native speakers and many people consider it vulgar, though quite a few slang phrases have already come into standard usage. Slang contains many obscene and offensive words and phrases. It also has many expressions that are acceptable in informal communication. Slang is highly idiomatic. It is flippant, irreverent, indecorous; it may be indecent or obscene. Its colorful metaphors are generally directed at respectability, and it is this succinct, sometimes witty, frequently impertinent social criticism that gives slang its characteristic flavor. Slang, then, includes not just words but words used in a special way in a certain social context. The origin of the word slang itself is obscure; it first appeared in print around 1800, applied to the speech of disreputable and criminal classes in London.

Language is the property of a community of speakers. People rarely speak, or write, with only themselves as the audience. It should not be surprising then that some components and forms of language are socially motivated. Slang is one kind of vocabulary that serves the social nature of language. In an important article in 1978 Bethany Dumas and Jonathan Lighter make the crucial point that slang must be identified by its social consequences, by the effects its use has on the relationship between speaker and audience.

Dumas and Lighter posit four criteria for identifying a word or phrase as slang .3

1. Its presence will markedly lower, at least for the moment, the dignity of formal or serious speech or writing.

2. Its use implies the user's familiarity either with the referent or with that less statusful or less responsible class of people who have such special familiarity and use the term.

3. It is a tabooed term in ordinary discourse with persons of higher social rank or greater responsibility.

4. It is used in place of the well-known conventional synonym, especially in order (a) to protect the user from the discomfort caused by the conventional item or (b) to protect the user from the discomfort or annoyance of further elaboration.

They conclude that "when something fits at least two of the criteria, a linguistically sensitive audience will react to it in a certain way. This reaction, which cannot be measured, is the ultimate identifying characteristic of true slang". In other words, Dumas and Lighter's formulation requires that the type of lexis called slang be recognized for its power to effect union between speaker and hearer. Whether or not the particulars of their definition are necessary or sufficient, Dumas and Lighter are right. Slang cannot be defined independent of its functions and use.

Despite the difficulties of defining the term, slang does have some consistent characteristics.4 Slang is lexical rather than phonological or syntactic, though, in English at least, body language and intonation are often important in signaling that a word or phrase is to be interpreted as slang. Nor is there a peculiarly slang syntax. Slang expressions do not follow idiosyncratic word order, and slang words and phrases typically fit into an appropriate grammatical slot in an established syntactic pattern. Furthermore, the productive morphological processes responsible for slang are the same ones responsible for the general vocabulary, i.e., for English, compounding, affixation, shortening, and functional shift.

1.2 The problem of definition

 

In linguistics, where definitions at best are often imprecise and leaky, that of slang is especially notorious. The problem is one of complexity, such that a definition satisfying to one person or authority would seem inadequate to another because the prime focus is different. Like the proverbial blind men describing an elephant, all correctly, none sufficiently, we tend to stress one aspect or another of slang /11/.

There is hardly any other term that is as ambiguous and obscure as the term slang. Slang seems to mean everything that is below the standard of usage of present-day English.

Much has been said and written about it. This is probably due to the uncertainty of the concept itself. No one has yet given a more or less satisfactory definition of the term. Nor has it been specified by any linguist who deals with the problem of the English vocabulary.

“The first thing that strikes the scholars is the fact that no one European language has singled out a special layer of vocabulary and named it slang, though all of them distinguish such group of words as jargon, cant and the like. Why was it necessary to invent a special term for something that has not been clearly defined as jargon or can't have? Is this phenomenon specifically English? Has slang any special features, which no other group within the non-literary vocabulary can lay, claim to? The distinctions between slang and other groups of unconventional English, though perhaps subtle and sometimes difficult to grasp, should nevertheless be subjected to a more detailed linguistic specification”/12:68/.

Slang is informal, nonstandard words and phrases, generally shorter lived than the expressions of ordinary colloquial speech, and typically formed by creative, often witty juxtapositions of words or images. Slang can be contrasted with jargon (technical language of occupational or other groups) and with argot or cant (secret vocabulary of underworld groups), but the borderlines separating these categories from slang are greatly blurred, and some writers use the terms cant, argot, and jargon in a general way to include all the foregoing meanings /13/.

Webster’s “Third New International Dictionary” gives the following definition of the term:

Slang:

1. Language peculiar to a particular group as:

a) the special and often secret vocabulary used by a class (as thieves, beggars) and usually felt to be vulgar or inferior: argot;

b) the jargon used by or associated with a particular trade, profession, or field of activity.

2. A non-standard vocabulary composed of words and senses characterized primary by connotations of extreme informality and usually a currency not limited to a particular region and composed typically of coinages or arbitrarily changed words, clipped or shortened forms, extravagant, forced or facetious figures of speech, or verbal novelties usually experiencing quick popularity and relatively rapid decline into disuse.

The “New Oxford English Dictionary” defines slang as follows:

a) the special vocabulary used by any set of persons of a low or disreputable   character; language of a low and vulgar type;

b) the cant or jargon of a certain class or period;

c) language of a highly colloquial type considered as below the level of standard educated speech, and consisting either of new words or of current words employed in some special sense.”

As it is seen from these quotations slang is represented both as a special vocabulary and as a special language. This is the first thing that causes confusion. If this is a certain lexical layer, than why should it be given the rank of language or a dialect of even a patois, then it should be characterized not only by its peculiar use of words but also by phonetic, morphological and syntactical peculiarities.

J.B. Greenough and C.L. Kitteridge define slang in the following way:

“Slang… is a peculiar kind of vagabond language, always hanging on the outskirts of legitimate speech but continually straying or forcing its way into the most respectable company.”

Another definition of slang, which is worth quoting, is one made by Eric Partridge, the eminent student of the non-literary language.

“Slang is much rather a spoken than a literary language. It originates, nearly always, in speech. To coin a term on a written page is almost inevitably to brand it as a neologism which is either be accepted or become a nonce-word (or phrase), but, except in the rarest instances, that term will not be slang”/14/.

In most of the dictionaries slang is used as convenient stylistic notation for a word or a phrase that cannot be specified more exactly. The obscure etymology of the term itself affects its use as a stylistic notation. Whenever the notation appears in a dictionary it may serve as an indication that the unit presented is non-literary, but not pinpointed. That is the reason why the various dictionaries disagree in the use of this term when applied as a stylistic notation.

Any new coinage that has not gained recognition and therefore has not yet been received into Standard English is easily branded as slang /15/.

The different and heterogeneous phenomena united under the vague term slang cause natural confusion and do not encourage scholars to seek more objective criteria in order to distinguish the various stylistic layers of the English colloquial vocabulary. The confusion is made still deeper by the fact that any word or expression apparently legitimate, if used in an arbitrary, fanciful or metaphorical sense, may easily be labeled as slang /16/.

The term “slang” which is widely used in English linguistic science should be clearly specified if it is to be used as a term, i.e. it is should refer to some definite notion and should be definable in explicit, simple terms. It is suggested that the term “slang” should be used for those forms of the English vocabulary which are either mispronounced or distorted in some way phonetically, morphologically or lexically. The term “slang” should be also used to specify some elements, which may be called over-colloquial. As for the other groups of words hitherto classified as slang, they should be specified according to the universally accepted classification of the vocabulary of the language /17/.

Slang is nothing but a deviation from the established norm at the level of the vocabulary of the language. V.V.Vinogradov writes that one of the tasks set before the branch of linguistic science that is now called stylistics, is a thorough study of all changes in vocabulary, set phrases, grammatical constructions, their functions, an evaluation of any breaking away from the established norm, and classification of mistakes and failures in word coinage /12/.

Some scholars define standard slang, the slang that is common to all those who, though employing received standard in their writing and speech, also use an informal language which, in fact, is no language but merely a way of speaking, using special words and phrases in some special sense. The most confusing definition of the nature of slang is the following one given by Partridge: “…personality and one’s surroundings (social or occupational) are the two co-efficients, the two chief factors, the determining causes of the nature of slang, as they are of language in general and of style.”

According to this statement one may get the idea that language, style and slang all have the same nature, the same determining causes /16/. Personality and surroundings determine:

nature of the slang used by a definite person;

nature of the language he uses;

kind of style he writes.

There is a general tendency in England and to some extent in the US to over-estimate the significance of slang by attaching to it more significance than it deserves. Slang is regarded as the quintessence of colloquial speech and therefore stands above all the laws of grammar. Though it is regarded by some purists as a language that stands below standard English, it is highly praised nowadays as “vivid”, “more flexible”, “more picturesque”, “richer in vocabulary” and so on /18/.

Unwittingly one arrives at the idea that slang, as used by English and Americans, is a universal term for any word or phrase which, though not yet recognized as  standard English, has won general recognition as a fresh innovation quite irrespective of its nature: whether it is cant, jargon, dialect, jocular or pure colloquialism. It is therefore important, for the sake of a scientific classification of the English vocabulary, to make a more exact discrimination between heterogeneous elements in vocabulary, no matter how difficult it may be /19/.

It is suggestive that there is a tendency in some modern dictionaries to replace the label “slang” by informal or colloquial. Such a practice clearly manifests the dissatisfaction of some lexicographers with the term “slang”. This is mainly due to the ambiguity of the term /1/.

On the other hand, some lexicographers, as has already been pointed out, still make use of the term “slang” as a substitute for “jargon”, “cant”, “colloquialism”, “professionalism”, “vulgar”, “dialectal”. Thus, in his dictionary Professor Barnhart gives the label “slang” to such innovations as “grab - to cause, to react; to make an impression on”, which should be classified as newspaper jargon; “grass or pot - marijuana”, which are positively cant words (the quotation that follows proves it quite unambiguously), “groove - something very enjoyable”, “grunt - US military slang”, which in fact is professionalism; “guppy tummy, British slang - a common intestinal upset experienced by travelers”, which is a colloquialism; “hangup - a psychological or emotional problem”, which is undoubtedly a professionalism, which has undergone extension of meaning and now, according to Barnhart also means “any problem or difficulty, especially one that causes annoyance or irritation.”

The use of the label “slang” in this way is evidently due to the fact that Barnhart’s Dictionary aims not so much at discrimination between different stylistic subtleties of neologisms but mainly at fixation of lexical units which have already won general recognition thorough constant repetition on newspaper language.

Slang, according to the American poet, Carl Sandburg is “Language which takes off its coat, spits on its hands-and goes to work”.