"So what's your research about?"
"I study the history of English slang words."
"Interesting. Please tell me more about it..."
"Alright then."
"SLANG, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, refers to "the special vocabulary used by any set of people of a low or disreputable characters; or language of a low and vulgar type" (OED Online 2013). The study of slang is highly fascinating from a sociolinguistic point of view, as it raises the following questions: What kind of people tend to use slang? Why do people use slang words? Why is slang generally perceived as bad language? Whilst some linguists have paid some scholarly attention to slang in English (Michael Adams' Slang: The People's Poetry and Julie Coleman's four volumed History of Cant and Slang Dictionaries), this linguistic phenomenon is still largely under-research at present, especially in histories of English. The aim of my PhD study is to explore how slang words, which carries non-literal and flexible meanings, are used and understood by different speakers in different speech contexts. To that end, I adopt modern sociolinguistic tools to describe the use of slang (thieves' slang in particular) between 1700 and 1800, a period in which the label 'slang' was first used to refer to this special type of lexis. As historical linguists can only rely on written data from the past, my linguistic evidence comes from the Old Bailey Proceedings Online, and the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), two extensive, online databases of digitised eighteenth-century texts to data. Using corpus-based techniques to search the database, I collect and analyse individual texts to discover which slang words are used in those texts, why these particular terms are used in this specific context, and to what extent the meanings of the slang words has changed over time."
"Aha."
"By the way, if you're curious to see me explaining my research in Pecha Kucha style, check out the video below."
"OK."
"I study the history of English slang words."
"Interesting. Please tell me more about it..."
"Alright then."
"SLANG, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, refers to "the special vocabulary used by any set of people of a low or disreputable characters; or language of a low and vulgar type" (OED Online 2013). The study of slang is highly fascinating from a sociolinguistic point of view, as it raises the following questions: What kind of people tend to use slang? Why do people use slang words? Why is slang generally perceived as bad language? Whilst some linguists have paid some scholarly attention to slang in English (Michael Adams' Slang: The People's Poetry and Julie Coleman's four volumed History of Cant and Slang Dictionaries), this linguistic phenomenon is still largely under-research at present, especially in histories of English. The aim of my PhD study is to explore how slang words, which carries non-literal and flexible meanings, are used and understood by different speakers in different speech contexts. To that end, I adopt modern sociolinguistic tools to describe the use of slang (thieves' slang in particular) between 1700 and 1800, a period in which the label 'slang' was first used to refer to this special type of lexis. As historical linguists can only rely on written data from the past, my linguistic evidence comes from the Old Bailey Proceedings Online, and the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), two extensive, online databases of digitised eighteenth-century texts to data. Using corpus-based techniques to search the database, I collect and analyse individual texts to discover which slang words are used in those texts, why these particular terms are used in this specific context, and to what extent the meanings of the slang words has changed over time."
"Aha."
"By the way, if you're curious to see me explaining my research in Pecha Kucha style, check out the video below."
"OK."
