XIII Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2021

Dialectal words are those which in the process of integration of the English national language remained beyond its literary boundaries, and their use is generally confined to a definite locality.

There is sometimes a difficulty in distinguishing dialectal words from colloquial words. Some dialectal words have become so familiar in good colloquial or standard colloquial English that they are universally accepted as recognized units of the standard colloquial English.

Dialectal words are only to be found in the style of emotive prose, very rarely in other styles. And even here their use is confined to the function of characterizing personalities through their speech. Perhaps it would not be a false supposition to suggest that if it were not for the use of the dialectal words in emotive prose they would have already disappeared entirely from the English language.

Writers who use dialectal words for the purpose of characterizing the speech of a person in a piece of emotive prose or drama, introduce them into the word texture in different ways. Some writers make an unrestrained use of dialectal words and also slang, jargonisms and professionalisms, not only in characterization, but also in their narrative.

Vulgar words or vulgarisms.

The term vulgarism , as used to single out a definite group of words of non-standard English, is rather misleading. The ambiguity of the term apparently proceeds from the etymology of the word. Vulgar, as explained by the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, means a) words or names employed in ordinary speech; b) common, familiar; c) commonly current or prevalent, generally or widely disseminated.

These two submeanings are the foundation of what we here name vulgarisms. So vulgarisms are:

1) expletives and swear words which are of an abusive character, like ‘damn’, ‘bloody’, ‘to hell’, ‘goddam’ and, as some dictionaries state, used now as general exclamations;

2) obscene words. These are known as four-letter words the use of which is banned in any form of intercourse as being indecent. Historians tell us that in Middle Ages and down into the 16th century they were accepted in oral speech and after Caxton even admitted to the printed page. All of these words are of Anglo-Saxon origin.

Vulgarisms are often used in conversation out of habit, without any thought of what they mean, or in imitation of those who use them in order not to seem old-fashioned or prudish.Unfortunately in modem fiction these words have gained legitimacy. The most vulgar of them are now to be found even in good novels. This lifting of the taboo has given rise to the almost unrestrained employment of words which soil the literary language. However, they .will never acquire the status of standard English vocabulary and will always remain on the outskirts.

The function of expletives is almost the same as that of interjections, that is to express strong emotions, mainly annoyance, anger, vexation and the like. They are not to be found in any functional style of language except emotive prose, and here only in the direct speech of the characters.

Colloquial coinages (words and meanings).

Colloquial coinages (nonce-words), unlike those of a literary-bookish character, are spontaneous and elusive. This proceeds from the very nature of the colloquial words as such. Not all of the colloquial nonce-words are fixed in dictionaries or even in writing and therefore most of them disappear from the language leaving no trace in it whatsoever.

Some nonce-words and meanings may, on the one hand, acquire legitimacy and thus become facts of the language, while, on the other hand, they may be classified as literary or colloquial according to which of the meanings is being dealt with.

There are some which enjoy hopeful prospects of staying in the vocabulary of the language. The nature of these creations is such that if they appear in speech they become notfceable and may develop into catch-words, Then they become fixed as new colloquial coinages and cease to be nonce-words. They have acquired a new significance and a new stylistic evaluation. They are then labelled as slang, colloquial, vulgar or something of this kind.

Particularly interesting are the contextual meanings of words. They may rightly be called nonce-meanings. They are frequently used in one context only, and no traces of the meaning are to be found in dictionaries.Thus, the word ‘opening’ in the general meaning of a way in the sentence “This was an opening and I followed it”, is a contextual meaning which may or may not in the long run become one of the dictionary meanings.

Most of the words which we call here colloquial coinages are newlyminted words, expressions or meanings which are labelled slang in many modern dictionaries. But we refrain from using the term so freely as it is used in dictionaries firstly because of its ambiguity, and secondly because we reserve it for phenomena which in Russian are known as просторечье, i. e. city vernacular bordering on non-literary speech.

List of references:

Galperin I.R. English Stylistics. Moscow: USSR, 2014. 333 p.

Galperin I.R. Stylistics. M.: Higher School, 1977: 333 р.

Gurevich V.V. English Stylistics. Moscow: Flinta: Nauka, 2008 p.

https://studopedia.com.ua/1_380397_D-Dialectal-words.html