Exploring the ‘shashification’ of teenage slang (original) (raw)

English Today, 2018

Abstract

Teenage slang has been traditionally connected to lexical creativity and subculture, which is reflected in the ungrammaticality of some English units. This article attempts to explore the morpho-phonological variations and linguistic motives underlying the formation of a group of back-clipped words that result from the respelling of consonant clusters representing the fricative /ʃ/ in final position, e.g. sesh < session, nutrish < nutritional, fash < fashion. The analysis covers (a) the examination of thirty-two words extracted from teen websites and dictionaries; and (b) the reassessment of the phonaesthetic and phonotactic features of /ʃ/ in the process of lexical ‘slangification’ through a questionnaire containing some nonexistent words, which is intended to measure the cognitive perception of ‘slang-sounding’ units. The findings show that there is a correlation between the final position of the fricative -sh /ʃ/ and the slangification of teenage slang.

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