Problems of modern British and American slang [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION The aim of the present book is to help the students of English to get acquainted with problems of modern British and American slang, especially with their semantic and word-formatlonal peculiarities. We have tried to make a description and comparison of these two bodies of slang current in the twentieth century. The linguistic material to be examined was excerpted from different sources, but mainly from: 1. for British Slang - E, Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, Third Edition, London 1949 (about 49,200 entries), 2, for American Slang - H, Wentworth - S, B. Rexner, Dictionary of American Slang, Second Edition, New York 1967 (about 51,ooo entries). To balance the upper (nearer) chronological limit of the tv/o dictionaries, the material of E. Partridges dictionary was augmented by excerpts from a later^ition of his work (E, Partridge Smaller Slang Dictionary, London 1961). Caution was also taken to eliminate the incongruities which might have arisen with regard to the lowered (ulterior) limit of time of the two dictionaries, the slang of the American dictionary is all modern: no entry is made of pre-twentieth century slang. E, Partridge's material registers also slangisms of the nineteenth, eighteenth and even preceding centuries. But as E. Partridge makes a careful record of more or less precise time--indications, ^ was a relatively easy task to excerpt only those slangisms which have presumably arisen in the twentieth century. The literature on slang is in a constant flux. According to the principle by which slang is defined, the criticism is roughly divided into five main schools: genetival, constitutive, expressive (or ideosyncratic), personalistic and 'slang versus standard', The latter is most akin to the comprehension of slang in the present book, and is therefore heavily relied upon. The book consists of toee parts, conclusions and bibliography. The first part contains an elaboration of the definition of slang, general considerations as regards its demarcation from peripheral areas, and sociolinguistic outline of the differences tietween the relation oi the Brltitih and American Slang to the respective language standards. - 3 -