Linguistic Studies and Essays

Vol. 62 No. 1 (2024)
Articles

A morphosyntactic and morphosemantic analysis of English slang suffixoids

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  • Elisa Mattiello
Elisa Mattiello
Università di Pisa
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4454/ssl.v62i1.380

Published 2024-07-11

Keywords

  • English slang,
  • morphosyntactic patterns,
  • schemas,
  • suffixoids,
  • Construction Morphology
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Abstract

This study investigates English slang suffixoids (Sfxds) such as -ass (in fat-ass), -brain (in birdbrain), -face (in shitface), and -head (in airhead) from the morphosyntactic and morphosemantic viewpoints. Hitherto, the productivity of these morphological elements and their transitional character, borderline between compounding and derivation, have been amply demonstrated. In this study, the focus is on the two privileged morphosyntactic patterns creating denominal and deadjectival nouns – i.e. [[X]N [Sfxd]N]N and [[X]A [Sfxd]N]N – and on their literal or figurative interpretation. A qualitative analysis of a dataset drawn from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and Green’s Dictionary of Slang (2023) shows the general metonymic nature of suffixoids, referring to individuals, hence conveying the seme [human] by making reference to one of their body parts with a negative [pejorative] intent. By adopting a construction morphology approach, the analysis aims at finding out regular schemas for the scrutiny and understanding of English nouns displaying a slang suffixoid, as well as for the prediction of new words.

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