Substandard Vocabulary in the System of Urban Communication

Abstract

The article is devoted to substandard elements which are considered as one of the components in the system of urban forms of communication. The Object of our research is substandard vocabulary, the Subject is structural characteristics of the modern city language, the Purpose of the study is to define the main types of substandard vocabulary and their role in the system of urban communication. The theoretical base of our research includes the scientific works of native and foreign linguists, which are devoted to urban linguistics (B. Larin, M. Makovskyi, V. Labov, T. Yerofeieva, L. Pederson, R. McDavid, O. Horbach, L. Stavytska, Y. Stepanov, S. Martos). Different lexical and phraseological units, taken from the Ukrainian, Russian and American Dictionaries of slang and jargon, serve as the material of our research. The main components of the city language include literary language, territorial dialects, different intermediate transitional types, which are used in the colloquial everyday communication but do not have territorial limited character, and social dialects. The structural characteristics, proposed in the article, demonstrate the variety and correlation of different subsystems of the city language. Today peripheral elements play the main role in the city communication. They are also called substandard, non-codified, marginal, non-literary elements or the jargon styles of communication. Among substandard elements of the city language the most important are social dialects, which include such subsystems as argot, jargon and slang. The origin, functioning and characteristics of each subsystem are studied on the material of linguistic literature of different countries. It is also ascertained that argot is the oldest form of sociolects, jargon divides into corporative and professional ones, in the structure of slangy words there are common and special slang. Besides, we can speak about sociolectosentrism of the native linguistics and linguemosentrism of the English tradition of slang nomination. Except social dialects, the important structural elements of the city language are also intermediate transitional types, which include koine, colloquialisms, interdialect, surzhyk, pidgin and creole. Surzhyk can be attributed to the same type of language formations as pidgin and creole because these types of oral speech were created mostly by means of the units mixing of the obtruded language of the parent state with the elements of the native languages.