Эссе на тему What do we mean by ‘slang’? Discuss, giving examples to support your answer.

Фрагмент текста работы:

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY ‘SLANG’?

Any language is in the state of continuous development, which is characterized by the formation of new lexical units, or the revision of the meaning of existing ones. First of all, language transformations of the kind are fixed in colloquial speech, for example, in informal vocabulary, in particular, in slang.
Currently, in linguistic research more and more attention is paid to slang, which is due to its increased penetration into the national language and its implementation and further adaptation. Slang is characterized by its brightness and figurativeness, slang lexical units appear and disappear very easily, emphasizing the dynamism of the language development. Slang also has stylistic goals: it is used to convey modernity, uniqueness, going beyond the norm and the accepted language standards, to convey a certain mood of the speaker, for instance, anger or embarrassment.
In particular, T.A. Solovieva argues that slang should be considered only as an extremely mobile layer of colloquial speech of the language. Slang includes words and expressions belonging to the literary norm and having been rethought, as well as neologisms formed according to the word-formation models of the language. Slang inherently serves the purpose of increasing the expressiveness of speech or a written text [4].
V.A. Homyakov notes that slang is “a special peripheral lexical layer that lies both outside the boundaries of colloquial literary speech and outside the boundaries of dialects of the national language. It includes, on the one hand, the layer of specific vocabulary and phraseology of professional dialects, social jargons and slangs of the criminal world, and, on the other hand, the layer of widespread and commonly understood emotionally expressive vocabulary and phraseology of non-literary colloquial speech” [5, p.11].