Ebook: An Introduction to English Slang. A Description of its Morphology, Semantics and Sociology

Издательство Polimetrica, 2008, -325 pp.English Library: the Linguistics Bookshelf, Volume 2.
Despite the amount of work that has been carried out to collect English slang data, there has been, to date, no general introductory work that has attempted to synthesize the main points of predictable relevance of slang as a linguistic phenomenon. This book aims to fill the gap.
The reasons for this constant omission are mainly to be sought in the traditional attitude of linguists and morphologists towards any linguistic fact that is dubious in terms of grammar and its recognized rules. Slang, a linguistic modality confined to spoken language, has always been difficult to locate, to explain and to grasp as a unitary phenomenon. This has discouraged overall formal accounts. Or, at most, its relevance has been explored in sociology, where it has been described as a manifestation of lowclass membership, or as the secret language of restricted groups, unwilling to communicate with outsiders, or, more generically, it has been conflated with homiletic or other colloquial varieties. Slang has been preferentially described in relation to the social effects that it produces rather than as a phenomenon in itself. The linguistic comments have been mainly impressionistic and hardly descriptive or explanatory of the phenomenon.
The present work comes as the result of a dissatisfaction with such studies and as an attempt – a successful one – to fill the void of a rigorous linguistic investigation.
The book is a careful, theory-grounded description of slang and of its relevance in key areas such as morphology, semantics and sociopragmatics. It offers a new understanding of slang formation mechanisms, of its elusive, unstable meanings and meaning relations and, lastly, it systematically reconsiders its socio-pragmatic impact and relevance.
The main challenge for the author was to overcome widespread prejudice whereby slang is allegedly only a marginal area of the lexicon, a useless redundancy in semantics, an ‘oddity’ in wordformation and an isolated phenomenon, lacking isomorphism with syntactic relationships.
The key hypothesis of the project, by contrast, is that slang has a locus both in the lexicon and among word-formation mechanisms and that its input/output ‘rules’ are to be found within the borders of the phenomenon itself, and not in contrast with canonical grammatical rules. A comparison with grammatical morphology only provides a basis for formulating evaluation criteria, but is not the main target of the work. Slang is a widespread phenomenon deserving a space of its own in linguistic inquiry, precisely on account of its frequent independence of behaviour and extragrammatical quality.
The author’s appropriate model of explanation within the relevant disciplines and the wealth of data systematically analysed in the book lead to reliable viewpoints on the issue and to an interesting wide-ranging description of the phenomenon.
A thorough description of slang must take into account and accommodate its frequently discrepant behaviour in terms of formation mechanisms. It often deviates from basic rules of morphological grammar, but it may also represent a violation of the more general principle of grammatical competence. Even when slang words relate to morphological structures governed by morphological competence, they may be discrepant because they are coined conscientiously rather than spontaneously. This is the case with many sophisticated coinages, like rhyming reduplicatives or blends, or also analogical formations, like workaholic or Irangate. Such forms are normally excluded by morphologists, owing to their non-predictability.
Slang may also deviate from any criterion of predictability and transparency at the level of semantics. Meaning is often a conscientious attribution, rather than the output of compositional elements. This is the case, for example, with Cockney rhyming slang, many compounds, but also with a large number of single words, whose meaning is totally at variance with the meaning the same words have in the standard language.
The study of slang also opens up many sociological and sociolinguistic prospects, amply investigated in the literature. Slang separates society into groups along various dimensions, and this fact is certainly of great relevance in sociology and partly explains specific linguistic features of slang, such as its search for originality and secrecy. Of special interest, though, is the area of emotions and attitudes, in which the speaker’s choices of slangy formations and their pragmatic effects on the addressee are carefully regulated. This book approaches the matter from a wide-ranging perspective and provides a clear account of the various motivations which lie at the basis of slang use.Introduction
Previous Studies on Slang
Grammatical and Extra-grammatical Morphology
Lexical Organization and Disorganization
Sociological Properties
Final Remarks