Storia della Lingua Inglese g g Lecture 8 Modulo 2

Transcript

Storia della Lingua Inglese - Dott.ssa
Maria Ivana Lorenzetti AA 20012/13
Storia della Lingua
g Inglese
g
Lecture 8
Modulo 2
DOTT.SSA MARIA IVANA LORENZETTI
Favourite Themes in Slang

Sexuality
Bodily functions
Intoxication by alcohol
or drugs
Violent actions of
various kinds
Money
Death
Deception
Criminal activity
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Weakness of mind or
character
Positive or negative
evaluation of people of
different classes and
groups
Racial
Ethnic
Sexual
Regional
Socioeconomic
occupational
1
The Polyfunctionality of the Domain of
Food in slang

The 5 senses are very important as vehicles of
metaphors in the creation of new meanings and
expressions
i
Food is a very productive field, in that it appeals to
taste, smell, sight and touch
Food terms are used to indicate

Money: cabbage, lettuce, kale
Parts of the body: cabbage head; nuts; cauliflower ear
People: cold fish,
fish frog,
frog honey,
honey sweety pie
General situations and attitudes: to receive a chewing
out; to be unable to swallow another’s story; to ask what’s
cooking, or it boils down to what?
Drunkness: boiled, fried, pickled
The Domain of Sexuality

Slang words for sex carry little emotional
connotation and express naked desire or
connotation,
mechanical acts. They are often cynical anc
‘tough’
Sex and food: subconscious relation between
sex and food

Sexual parts:Banana; cherry;
Attractive people: honey, peach, cookie
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The Domain of Sexuality (2)

Sex is also frequently associated to
deception betrayal and cheating
deception,

I got fucked
Fuck you; screw you
Confucion, screwed up, snafu (situation normal all
fucked up) FUBAR (fucked up beyond all
recognition
Success and sexual energy are related in slang,
in that thwarted sexual energy will result in
personal disaster
Influences on Slang

Military sources: U.S. participation in World War I
and II expanded the armed forces to nearly 5 million
men and forced the formation of countless networks
of individuals from different regions and social
classes. The spread of military jargon was amplified
by mass media

Snafu (situation normal – all fucked up) ‘a positive situation
suddenly turning to negative’
negative
Blitz; sweat it out; chew out; pissed off
Nam ‘Vietnam’ from the Vietnam War
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Influences on Slang (2)

Cowboy slang: in the 19th century
Cowpunch
Bronco-buster
B
b t
Dogey ‘a runted or motherless calf’

Jazz
Jam-session
Jive
Killer-diller

Black English
Funky
Dig
Man
“The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D.
Salinger

The novel was published in 1951 and tells the story
of hiss you
o
young
gp
protagonist,
otago st, Holden
o de Cau
Caulfield,
e d, a
sixteen-year-old boy.
Holden narrates his story in the first-person and
using a very colloquial style. The story takes place in
December 1949, just before Christmas holidays.
He’s a student at Pencey Prep High School in
Pennsylvania,
y
and after changing
g g three different
schools for his poor performance, he plans to
secretly leave school. His decision is induced by his
awareness to be surrounded by phonies, hypocrite
roommates, professors and adults in general.
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“The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D.
Salinger (2)

He escapes school and spends 3 days of
g in New York,, meeting
g several
wandering
peculiar characters and escaping from all of
them in the end. He’s emotionally divided
between the duty of attending school and his
apathy and complete absence of any aspiration.
His only wish would be to be a catcher in the
rye, an imaginary guardian of numerous children
running and playing in a rye field on the edge of
a cliff. Metaphorically his only aspiration is to
become an heroic character, whose mere task is
just to save children from falling into the abyss of
adulthood
“The Catcher in the Rye”: the
Language

The language in the novel mirrors the dichotomy
the protagonist feels,
feels i.e.
i e a contrast between
teenagehood and maturity and slang offers the
chance to create a secret code, where rules and
conventions are just shared by the young people
His language is the language of 1950s alienated
teens full of vernacular,
vernacular scholastic jargon and
slang terms employed to describe the
protagonist’s actions and thoughts, using stream
of consciousness
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“The Catcher in the Rye”: the
Language

Salinger’s peculiar language, rich in slangy
constructions repetitions and vulgarisms
constructions,
vulgarisms,
deliberately breaks any constituted rule of “good
writing prose”
It surprisingly imitates oral youngsters’ speech
and so it includes all young 1950s American
speakers’ expressions which find no description
speakers
within grammatical English Standards
Extragrammatical Expressions

Extra-grammatical slangy formations are
ccharacterized
a acte ed by tthe
e co
contemporary
te po a y presence
p ese ce o
of
existent and nonexistent English terms

I’m the one that’s flunking out of the goddam place
and you’re asking me to write you your goddam
composition − I said

Very common vulgar interjection originated from the union
of God and damned/damn, producing a popular curse that
can be viewed as example of partial blend.
The first base god is unvaried, but the second base damn
undergoes a final clipping (damned/damn > dam)
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Extragrammatical Expressions (2)

Yeah, I know. The thing is though. I’ll be up the creek if I
don’t get it in. Be a buddy. Be a buddyroo. Okay?

The colloquial
Th
ll
i l noun buddy
b dd is
i lilinked
k d tto th
the extra-grammatical
t
ti l
suffix –roo. Buddy derives from the noun bud, and has
maintained its nominal status, despite the addition of the suffix -y.
Buddy could be viewed as a diminutive and hypocoristic version
of the slang noun bud, probably originated in Black English as a
way to address a friend of either sex or “a stranger whose name
is not known” (Lighter, 1994: 287)
a buddy is a friend, an associate and so is a buddyroo, which
could be interpreted as its variant typically used in the Navy
j
jargon
(Li
(Lighter,
ht 1994)
1994).
The suffix -roo, typical of American slang formations, is
commonly used to create jocular and “non-serious connoted
variants” of existing words

“I went and got her dress for her. She put it on and all, and
then she picked up her polo coat off the bed. – So long,
crumb bum – she said
crumb-bum,
Example of back-formation. A slang noun crumb has been
back-formed from an adjective crumby. Compound noun
formed by the term crumb, which is back-formed from
the adjective crumby, and the word bum, an
Americanism used to describe “a tramp, a homeless
person.”, preserving and reinforcing the original
adjectival meaning of something of “very
very poor quality.”
quality.
Crumb has acquired the meanings of “a filthy [...]
useless or despicable person”, but it is also a term for
indicating the head and the male genitalia
In Italian it was rendered as “mezza calzetta”
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“I don’t smoke, – [Sunny] said. She had a tiny
wheeny-whiny
ee y
y voice.
o ce You
ou cou
could
d hardly
a d y hear
ea her”
e
Ablaut reduplicative, formation produced by the
alternation of the same vowels, thus creating an
echo-word with an “apophonic” effect, similar to that
produced by a rhyme
It’s formed by a right-hand base (“whiny”) and a
nonexistent word (“wheeny”)
( wheeny ) which provides a
reduplicative effect, alternating its vocalic sounds.
The result of this combination of sounds is an
accentuation of something as particularly tiny and
also whiny like a child
Fanciful Expressions

They are the best manifestation of native speakers’
linguistic creativity, not following any standard
grammatical
i l pattern neither
ih b
belonging
l
i to any
determined conceptual path
She sings it very Dixieland and whore-house, and it
doesn’t sound at all mushy
Dixie’s land is the title of a song written by a
minstrel, Ohioan Daniel D. Emmett (1859). It
became very popular and started to be used to
indicate the typical musical culture of the southern
states of the United States This slang term, implies
a reference to the characteristic manner of singing
of black singers
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Fanciful Expressions (2)

The show wasn’t as bad as some I’ve seen.
[ ] The husband goes to war
[..]
war, and the wife
has this brother that’s a drunkard”
A common English term indicating a drunk
person or a person who regularly drinks
alcohol, as a consequence of an addiction.
It probably derives from the union of the past
participle drunk with the adverb hard
Expletives

Expletives, i.e. swear words represent some of the most
important stylistic features of the novel. Their frequency of
occurrence essentially contributes a rather slangy informal
register which characterizes the protagonist’s way of
speaking and opens the world of American 1950s teen
slang
It was icy as hell and I damn near fell
I don’t give a damn, except that I get bored sometimes
when people tell me to act my age
Besides, I know [that stuff] annoyed the hell out of old
Ackley
What the hellya reading?
You may be getting the hell out of here, but I have to stick
around long enough to graduate
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Expletives (2)

What the heck did you tell that crazy Maurice you wanted a
girl for, then? If you just had a goddam operation on your
goddam wuddayacallit.
wuddayacallit Huh?
Huh?”
Expletives like goddam, damn/darn and heck alternate
themselves in almost each sentence in the novel
The protagonist’s same critical behaviour is reflected by
Salinger’s continuous usage of idiomatic slangy
expressions formed by goddam/damn/darn (not to give a
goddam/damn/darn) and hell + a wide range of different
syntactical
y
structures ((to g
get the hell out of/ to g
give
someone the hell/just for the hell of something/to figure the
hell with/adjective + as hell/the hell/helluva/hellya)
Bad Words

And you hair’s so lovely. – Lovely my ass
It ends up with everybody at this long dinner
table laughing their asses off because the
great Dane comes in with a bunch of puppies
The only way she could go around with a basket
collecting dough would be if everybody kissed
her ass for her
You g
give me a royal
y p
pain in the ass,, if you
y want
to know the truth. – Boy, did she hit the ceiling
when I said that
Boy, I can’t stand that sonuvabitch. He’s one
sonuvabitch I really can’t stand
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Metaphorical Slangy Expressions

In the novel, numerous slangy and colloquial
expressions are used in order to establish a
direct cultural link between the protagonist
and the audience
The locution to hit the ceiling, literally
meaning “to strike the ceiling of a room or of
a means of transport
p with yyour head,, as a
consequence of a hard push”, has a
figurative metaphorical meaning: to “get very
angry and fly into a rage
Metaphorical Slang

My bother D.B.’s a writer and all, and my bother
Allie, the one that died, that I told you about, was a
wizard.
i d I’m
I’ the
h only
l really
ll d
dumb
b one
Exaggeration
Then he smacked me. I didn’t even try to get out of
the way or duck or anything. All I felt was this terrific
punch in my stomach
Metaphorical connection between a typical
behaviour of ducks
ducks, ii.e.to
e to dive downwards into water
for catching fish or other food, and a human
movement: that of “avoiding [a blow] by moving your
head or body quickly downwards.
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Metaphorical Slang (2)

Maybe I don’t! Maybe you don’t, either, – old Sally said. We
both hated each other’s guts by that time
It evokes
k th
the metaphorical
t h i l iimage off h
hating
ti someone’s
’
intestines, i.e. hating someone very deeply, a hatred that
graphically involves even someone’s body. In the novel, the
implications of this slangy expression are deliberately
exaggerated in order to achieve an ironical and funny effect
I certainly started to feel like a prize horse’s ass, though,
sitting there all by myself. There wasn’t anything to do
except
p smoke and drink
It vividly depicts a negative feeling: that of being “extremely
tired, [..] sick, worn out (un emerito cretino)
Compound-Adjectives and Nouns

Pimpy-looking/Whory-looking/ vomitylooking/scraggy looking/ dumpy
looking/scraggy-looking/
dumpy-looking/
looking/
show-off looking
Fat-assed/ half-assed
Show-off bastard
Madman stuff
Whore house
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