19. Low Colloquial Speech. Its Criteria and Linguistic peculiarities.

Low-colloq. ?illiterate popular speech It?s difficult to draw the boundary line between low colloq and dialect because in actual communication the 2 are often used together/ The chief peculiarities of l-c st concern gr/ and pronunciation as to the voc it?s different from familiar colloq in the way that it contains more vulgar words/Besides familiar colloquial words, slang words are frequent. Verbs with postpositive prevail: to put down ? to land, to go on ? to continue, etc. Interjections are numerous: why! well! there! dear me! oh, my! gee! The vocabulary is mostly limited to words of a general meaning, the sense it is employed in is seen from the context: get, fix, do, business, nice, swell, etc. Archaic forms of contraction ha?/ Tendency of redundancy.( well ,I mean< you see. Elements may be expressive and emotional , such as double negation( don?t give me no riddles//Don?t you call mother names. Don?t you forget it. Rude use of "you" ? You, come here/ or Come here you. The emotional w.are used as strong negatives ( Have you done what he told you? Have I hell. So he died of natural causes , did he? Natural causes he damned.

Example from the play «After The Fall» by Arthur Muller:

«I can’t hardly believe you came! Can you stay 5 monutes? I’m a singer now, see? In fact I am the top three. And for a long time I been wanting to tell you that.»

Can’t hardly and been are low colloquial speech. We are sure to understand the effect of the low colloquial speech when we compare it with a literary norm.

As the norm points to traditional, but not always right forms, a dialect, which in real life is surely combined with low colloquial speech, is a norm too, but substandard.

Usually low c.s. is embodied in oral dialogic speech of an every day, domestic type. But other variants are possible, even a talk about politics.

The divergence with literary norm can’t be considered as incorrectness. The form of low colloquial speech is clear and current within the limits of the definite language community. So we can say that double negation is also a norm, but dialectal. The violation of the norm could be the change of the word order.

20. Stylistic Differentiation of Vocabulary.

In order to get a more or less clear idea of the word-stock of any lan­guage, it must be presented as a system, the elements of which are in­terconnected, interrelated and yet independent.

The coinage of new lexical units, the development of meaning, the differentiation of words according to their stylistic evaluation and their spheres of usage, the correlation between meaning and concept and other problems connected with vocabulary are so multifarious and varied that it is difficult to grasp the systematic character of the word-stock of a language, though it co-exists with the systems of other levels—phone­tics, morphology and syntax.

For our purpose, i.e. for linguistic stylistics, a special type of classi­fication, viz. stylistic classification, is most important.

In accordance with the already-mentioned division of language into literary and colloquial, we may represent the whole of the word-stock

-Speciai Literary Vocabulary

-Common Literary Vocabulary

-Neutral Words

-Common CoUo^uiaL Vocabulary

-Profession­alisms i special Colloquial Vocabulary (non-Literary) of the English language as being divided into three main layers: the literary layer, the neutral layer and the collo­quial l а у е r. The literary and the colloquial layers contain a num­ber of subgroups each of which has a property it shares with all the sub­groups within the layer. This common property, which unites the differ­ent groups of words within the layer, may be called its aspect. The as­pect of the literary layer is its markedly bookish character. It is this that makes the layer more or less stable. The aspect of the colloquial layer of words is its lively spoken character. It is this that makes it unstable, fleeting.

The aspect of the neutral layer is its universal character. That means it is unrestricted in its use. It can be employed in all styles of language and in all spheres of human activity. It is this that makes the layer the most stable of all.

The literary layer of words consists of groups accepted as legitimate members of the English vocabulary. They have no local or dialectal character. '

The colloquial layer of words as qualified in most English or Amer­ican dictionaries is not infrequently limited to a definite language community or confined to a special locality where it circulates.

The literary vocabulary consists of the following groups of words: 1. common literary; 2. terms and learned words; 3. poetic words; 4. archaic words; 5. barbarisms and foreign words; 6. literary coinages including nonce-words.

The colloquial vocabulary falls into the following groups: 1. com­mon "colloquial words; 2. slang; 3. jargonisms; 4. professional words; 5. dialectal words; 6. vulgar words; 7. colloquial coinages.

The common literary, neutral and common colloquial words are grouped under the term standard English vocabu­lary. Other groups in the literary layer are regarded as special literary vocabulary ^id those in the collpquial layer are regarded as special collo­quial, (non-literary) vocabulary. The accompanying diagram on p. 71 illustrates this classification graphically.