Investigating the Notion of Slang in Lexicography

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Investigating the Notion of Slang in Lexicography

Journal Title: Argotica - Year 2015, Vol 0, Issue 1

Abstract

Dictionaries are undergoing many changes in their compilation. Among these are refined descriptions of collocations, discourse markers, and formality—to list just a few. In such a situation, every dictionary is incorporating new features to differentiate itself from others. These differences reflect descriptive attitudes toward language, boasting of corpus-based or attested examples. In recent times, dictionaries are becoming increasingly oriented to providing descriptions to contribute to foster the communicative competence of learners. Such efforts include introduction of CEFR norms in Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 3rd to show the level of vocabulary. CEFR, which is coming into wide use nowadays, aims to set the standard for communicative competence. When the communicative aspect is discussed, a learner wants to take recourse to labels in dictionaries, where each word is explained as formal, in-formal, slang, and so on. Among these, slang should be a key concept to consider prescriptivism and descriptivism in the compilation of dictionaries. Although DUMAS & LIGHTER (1978) interestingly set out some norms for a word to be judged as slang, the consensus on how slang can be defined does not seem to be well reached. The present study investigates how the notion of slang is captured in lexicography, based on the comparison between several corpora, and attempts to locate the notion of slang in relation to the prescriptivism-descriptivism continuum.

Authors and Affiliations

Masaaki Ogura

Keywords

EP ID EP200537
DOI -
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