SUFFIXATION IN THE 21ST CENTURY ENGLISH SLANG: A CASE STUDY OF DERIVATIONAL SEMANTICS

Abstract

The present article focuses on exploring the phenomenon of suffixation actively contributing to English slang lexicon in the 21st century. Suffixation is understood as a word formation mechanism in which postpositional auxiliary morphemes with associative derivational meaning (suffixes) serve as a means of semantic change in denotation, connotation or both. As this form of affixation is capable of conveying a wide range of stylistic, expressive, emotional, and evaluative connotations, it is especially productive in English slang, given its colloquial, informal, and substandard nature. It equally remains historically one of the major word-formation mechanisms invariably replenishing English slang. According to the present research, three substantival (-er, -ie, and -ing) and one participial (-ed) suffixes are labelled as highly productive, accounting for the formation of overall 381 slang items (or 75.3% of all suffixal neologisms). The lexical material represents a selection from three English slang dictionaries, namely “The concise new Partridge dictionary of slang and unconventional English” (2008), “Vice slang” (2008), and “The Routledge dictionary of modern American slang and unconventional English” (2009). Semantically, the substantival suffixes are found to express objectness denominating: animate entities based on their appearance, behaviour patterns or character traits, object of activity, origin, and professional or recreational activities; inanimate entities based on their function, functional location, origin, physical characteristics, and production method; phenomena based on their causers; actions or states based on their characteristics. The only participial suffix attested, apart from traditionally conveying attributiveness as a result of an action, equally reveals a novel meaning – ‘alcohol- or drug-intoxicated’, when either the morphemically segmented root does not exist as a separate lexeme / as a morpheme within a derivative, and is, therefore, semantically unattested, or the root formally exists as a separate lexeme / as a morpheme within a derivative but is semantically incompatible with the slang neologism.