Lecture 10

LEXICAL (STYLISTIC) STRATA IN

CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH

The criteria of determining lexical strata are diachrony and synchrony.

Diachronic lexical strata - chronologically determined; archaisms & neologisms.

Synchronic lexical strata - the totality of lexical units subordinated to the linguistic phenomena manifestly acting in a certain period; scientific terms, foreign words, archaisms, technical terms, slang terms, dialecticisms, and vulgar terms.

Diachronic lexical strata

A. Archaisms - cover words, as well as meanings and pronunciations that have become old-fashioned or that have been completely excluded from common usage.

a) grammatical archaisms: -the ending –est in the second person singular of verbs in the present: thou speakest ‘you speak’; thou hast spoken ‘you have spoken’;-the use of two or even more than two negations in one and the same sentence: That cannot be so neither (Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona); Thou hast spoken no word all this while - nor understood none neither).-the use of two relative pronouns: ‘Men shal wel knowe who that I am’. (Caxton, 1485, quoted in Lightfoot, 1979:322)

Archaisms

b) phonetic archaisms: words that have undergone changes in their spelling or/and pronunciation in the course of time: hath ‘has’, tough/thee ‘you’, thy ‘your’.

c) lexical archaisms: words which have disappeared from the everyday language of the speakers, and which can be still encountered in poetry or historical works, where they create a certain atmosphere, e.g. brow ‘forehead’, morn ‘morning’

Archaisms

According to the persistence in the language:a. Absolute archaisms (archeologisms/obsolete words) –

these are lexical, grammatical or phonetic units that have disappeared from the language altogether:

e.g. ferne ˂ ‘remote’, thou/thee and the adjective thy disappeared completely from the language in the 18th century, except in certain dialects and poetry.

b. Relative archaisms = words, meanings or constructions that have been excluded from common usage but are still used occasionally in functional styles, dialects, etc:-potential archaisms-historisms

Archaisms

• potential archaisms = words, meanings or constructions of limited currency at present; limitation due to the replacement of their denominations by equivalents;

-they often occur in poetry - called ‘poetisms’: e.g. ere ‘before’, foe ‘enemy’, morn ‘morning’

-The deliberate usage of archaisms is a distinctive feature of the English romantic poetry, represented by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley and Keats; also characteristic of fairy-tales, anecdotes and other folklore productions.

Archaisms

• historisms = words that once denominated objects, phenomena, actions, relations which have lost in time their reality, use or topicalization;

- Used by writers in historical novels to create an appropriate atmosphere (Walter Scott’s historical novels).

e.g. thegn (Anglo-Saxon ‘nobleman’), gleeman (Anglo-Saxon ‘wandering minstrel’), witan (Anglo-Saxon ‘the king’s council), tournament.

B. NEOLOGISMS

Greek neo ‘new’ & logos ‘word’ = new words of a language.

- There are two meanings attached to the term neologisms:

▪a broad one - all new words (borrowings, newly created words, words that existed in the language but only recently received attention)

▪a restricted one - only those words which were recently borrowed.

- Factors that need to be taken into account in establishing the neologic character of a word: time and frequency.

NEOLOGISMS

Examples:

galvanoplasty (metallurgy), sonogram, CAT (computer axial tomography), cosmetic bonding, (medicine), corticosterone, nitroglycerine, radium (chemistry), apocope (linguistics), schizophrenia, egocentric, extrovert, psychoanalysis (psychology).

NEOLOGISMS

• military terms: as air raid, antiaircraft gun, tank and blimp, dud, slacker, trench foot, cootie, and war bride.

-air raid terms: blackout, blitz, blockbuster, dive-bombing, flathat (vezi Agnu –A word a day);

• film, radio and television we have such words as screen, reel, projector, close-up, fade-out, three-D (film), aerial, lead-in, loud-speaker, stand-by, microphone (radio), cable TV, teleprompter, telethon, videotape, VCR (television), camcorder.

• personal computers: RAM (random-access memory), ROM (read-only memory), DOS (disk operating system), byte, modem, software, hacker, download, spam, and vaccine; bogusware, phantom bug, earcon or keprom.

NEOLOGISMS

• financial sector: Archer (British slang)= ₤2,000; Placido (British slang) = ₤10; Seymour = a six-figure salary.

- neologisms are accepted in the standard language only if they are felt as necessary. Otherwise they rapidly fall into the category of absolute archaisms - nonce words (occurring, used, or made only once or for a special occasion).

NEOLOGISMS

Neologisms obtained by means of stylistic derivation which may be effected:-by means of reduction: e.g. ‘Then what’s the skeleton?’ (In Galsworthy’s The White Monkey) based on the saying ‘to have a skeleton in the closet’; -by paraphrase: ‘With an auspicious and a dropping eye’, (Hamlet) - from the old English saying ’to cry with an eye and laugh with the other’;-by mixed means: ‘...they were a very happy couple, riding side by side on their hobbies’ (from Marryat’s Midshipman Easy), inspired by the proverb ‘Every man has his hobby-horse’ (‘everybody has a favourite subject or idea’).

SYNCHRONIC LEXICAL STRATA

- layers of colloquial English: technical, slang, vulgar and dialectal.

a) Technical wordsIn English, the term technical does not refer strictly to ‘the language of

technique’, but also encompasses specialized words (with the exception of scientific words, which belong to the literary language). This stratum contains the vocabulary belonging to the domains of reference which the specialists are concerned with. Thus, we have the specialized language of chemists (containing such items as ‘inert gases’, ‘iodine’, ‘valence’), of soldiers, of sailors (containing such items as ’starboard, ‘clove-hitch’, ‘gybe’), of students, of handicraft, economics and politics.

- On the one hand, these specialized phrases can be very 'distinct'; on the other hand, they can intermingle with slang: Public School Slang, Navy Slang, Army Slang, R.A.F. Slang, etc.

- Problem in considering the difference between technical terms and slang. Leisi (1985:186): ‘it would be better to reserve the term slang for the perky and cheerful elements of the specialized language’.

SYNCHRONIC LEXICAL STRATA

b) Slang• Paul Roberts (1958): slang = one of those things that

everybody can recognize and nobody can define;• The Oxford Dictionary : 'the 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’.

• Greenough and Kittredge (1905) (quoted in Baugh & Cable, 1991:307); slang = ‘a peculiar kind of vagabond language, always hanging on the outskirts of legitimate speech, but continually straying or forcing its way into most respectable company’.

Sociolinguistic aspects of slang.

• Slang ˂ the special languages of subcultures, or ‘undercultures’: the criminal underworld, hoboes, gypsies, soldiers and sailors, the police, business workers, gamblers, cowboys, all sorts of students, show-business workers, jazz musicians, athletes and their fans, and immigrant or ethnic populations cutting across these other subcultures.

• several centres of gravity have shifted greatly during the past fifty years. Terms from the drug scene have multiplied astronomically. Sports also make a much larger contribution.

Examples of slang terms belonging to different areas

►drugs: yellow jacket (a capsule of narcotics), barbs (barbiturates), to get (to get relief or pleasure from a dose of narcotics), to freak out (to have intense hallucinations and other reactions from drugs), blue cheer (LSD), bogue (adj. –in need of narcotics), basuco (the residue that remains after refining cocaine, used as a drug), bong (a pipe for smoking marijuana), hubba (a chip or pellet of crack);

►sex: to get one’s rocks off (to have an orgasm), boom-boom (sexual activity), bunny fuck (very quick sexual act), chippy joint (a brothel), fairy (mail homosexual), American sock/gumboot (condom);

►army: bobtail (a dishonourable discharge), booby trap (WW2 –a hidden explosive charge designed to set off by some ordinary act), chicken colonel (a full colonel)), eighty-four (WW II – a naval prison);

Examples of slang terms belonging to different areas►sports: blind-side (v) (to tackle or block from an unseen quarter),

bonehead play (an error, esp. one caused by bad judgment);►criminal’s world: bullpen (prison: a cell or secure area where

prisoners are kept temporarily), fish (a new prison inmate);►music: blow (to play a musical instrument, esp. in jazz style and not

necessarily a wind instrument), eighty-eights (a piano), beach music (a style of American pop music based on black soul music and rhythm & blues, and originating on the coast of South Carolina), chicken-dancing (a type of dancing to pop music in which participants raise and lower their arms bent-elbowed, as if flapping their wings), hook (a repeated, typically catchy melodic phrase in a popular musical composition);

►student’s language: blob (a mistake), bone (a diligent student), bogue (adj.) (disgusting, unattractive), bogue (n) (a cigarette);

►food and drinks: belly-bomber (a small, highly spiced burger), blush wine (rosé wine), fuzzy navel (a cocktail made from peach schnapps and orange juice), huffer (a long roll or section of French bread with a sandwich-style filling).

Types of slang: cant, argot and jargon

1) CANT = ‘slang used by the underworld’; once defined as ‘the Sicilian dialect of Italian’.

e.g. to two-finger (to pickpocket), snow (cocaine), lugger (con-man – from ‘confidence man’)

- payolo (undercover or indirect payment for a commercial favour), C-note (a $100 bill), to hang paper (to write ‘bum’ checks), sawbuck (a $10 bill).

Types of slang: cant, argot and jargon

2) ARGOT. Cant and argot are nearly synonyms. But the term argot may also be applied to the specialized terminology of a profession or trade. Linguistic argot consists of terms such as phoneme, morpheme, case, lexical item, style and so on.

- The argot vocabulary is made up of common words and phrases with changed meaning (usually metaphors, e.g. shades (eye-glasses), chick (young woman), to split (to leave, to part).

Types of slang: cant, argot and jargon

3) JARGON, in one of its meanings, has the non-cant definition of argot. Practically, every conceivable profession, trade, and occupation has its own jargon: truck drivers, doctors, linguists, mechanics, schoolteachers, firemen, lawyers all use special terms of their trade. Here are some examples:

►journalese: tail-coat politics (pejoratively, with no personality), snapper (photographer taking snap-shots), hack (derived from hackney and used to designate any journalist, but felt as pejorative if used by somebody who doesn’t belong to the group);

►medical jargon: the big C (cancer), a cut and paste job a summer squash/a vegetable.

Many jargon terms pass into the standard language. Jargon spreads from a narrow group until it is used and understood by a large segment of population, similar to slang. Eventually it may lose its special status as either jargon or slang and gain entrance into the respectable circle of formal usage.

Synchronic lexical strata

c) Vulgar terms (‘four letter words’) = words that ought never to be used.

- Lots of people know these words (such as shit), but observe the convention to the extent that from birth to death they never say them.

- Other people give these words extra value as symbols of protest, for instance.

- a matter of convention: words with precisely the same meanings are not taboo (though they may be unrestricted for use as technical terms, like faeces, or with children, like poo-poo).

Synchronic lexical strata

d) Dialecticisms = words and phrases of current usage only in restricted dialectal areas (but they sometimes penetrate into the common language and even into the language of poetry and proverbs.

► Scottish: wee (small, tiny), bern/bairn (child), bony (beautiful); aye (yes), burn (stream), dram (drink, usually of whisky), loch (lake), pinkie (little finger), provost (mayor), to travel (to go on foot), flesher (butcher), clachlan (small village), Hogmanay (New Year’s Eve);

► Irish: airy (light-hearted), blather (talk nonsense), bold (naughty), cog (cheat), mannerly (well-mannered), shore (drain), yoke (thingummy), banshee (ghost, female spirit warning of death in a house), beyond the beyonds (incredible), if hardy comes to hardy (if the worst comes to the worst) good scram to you (good luck to you).