HUMANITARIAN RESEARCHES

Journal of fundamental and applied researches

Somatic nomination in the English argot

2022. №1, pp. 138-141

Uskova Anna I. - Candidate of Philological Sciences, Voronezh State Pedagogical University, Voronezh, Russia, uskanna@mail.ru

The article attempts to describe the issues of the English substandard and the features of the somatic nomination in the English argot in particular. The problem of nomination is considered within the framework of the anthropocentric approach, which makes it possible to reveal the specifics of the reflection of reality by representatives of the criminal subculture. The purpose of the article is to describe argotic somatic units/units with a somatic component in relation of their motivation. The research is carried out on the material of “The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English” by T.Danzell. The corpus of relevant examples is 460 units. On the basis of structural and semantic analysis the examples were organized into the classification according to the productivity of somatic components. Among most frequent somatisms were identified the following 11 units: hand, head, leg, brain, toes/fingers, hair, eyes, face, nose, mouth, ears. Less frequent nominations are heart, back, skin, bones, blood. The highest frequency was shown by argotisms with the components hand, head, leg, which is due to the belonging of these lexemes to the category of external parts of the human body, which seem to be the most active and functionally obvious for speakers. The research revealed that somatisms are actively involved in the derivational processes of argot and can be organized in long synonymic chains.

Key words: substandard, English argot, somatisms, motivation, synonymic chain

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