This study explores the semiotic aspects of American slang, specifically focusing on the phenomenon of reduplicative expressions in informal speech. Despite the extensive research on American slang, limited attention has been given to the cultural and mythical meanings embedded within reduplicative expressions. To address this gap, the study investigates how these expressions convey denotative, connotative, and mythical meanings within casual American discourse. The objectives of the study include: 1. To what extent does Barthes’ semiotic model hold potential for application in this study? 2. How are reduplicative slang expressions widely used in everyday American life? 3. To what extent do qualitative and quantitative methods have significance for this study? The methodology combines qualitative analysis, involving an in-depth examination of selected reduplicative expressions, with quantitative analysis to measure their prevalence and usage in informal speech. Barthes’ semiotic framework encompassing denotation, connotation, and myth forms the theoretical foundation of the study. The findings reveal that reduplicative slang expressions not only carry literal meanings but also embody rich cultural and social connotations, reflecting key aspects of everyday American life. These expressions enhance interpersonal communication and serve as markers of cultural identity within informal discourse. The implications of this study lie in its contribution to understanding the intersection between language and culture, providing insights for future research on semiotics and its application in linguistic studies.
PDBN Rashid, International Journal of Professional Studies, 2023
This paper presents a stylistic analysis of two poems of well-known poets of the English literature, namely; E.E. Cummings and the Irish noble laureate Seamus Heaney. The researcher's attempt here is to approach Cummings’s poem “maggie and milly and molly and may” and Heaney’s “A Kite for Aibhín” from the stylistics’ point of view. The paper also analyzes the poems using the tools of linguistics with a view to make their meaning explicit.
It is worth noting that stylistics as a scientific discipline is really beneficial to those who are teaching and studyi
... Show MorePDBN Rashid, International Journal of Development in Social Sciences and Humanities, 2023
War as a human phenomenon, has its own literature. Poetry is a major genre in this literature. This paper is an attempt to investigate and analyse some stylistic features in two selected, English and Arabic, war poems. These poems share the same theme.Both promote the principle of sacrificing one’s own life for the sake of homeland. This paper limits itself to analyse, thecontent words, tenses, semantic grouping of vocabulary and foregrounding in the two poems. The areas of analysis show great similarities in distributing the general content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs). In the analysis of the semantic areas of each content word, these poems reveal some similarities and some differences in their frequency rates.
... Show MoreIn addition to its basic communicative function, language can be used to imply information that is not actually stated, i.e. addressers do not always state exactly (or directly) what they mean. Such instances fall within the domain of pragmatics in that they have to do with how addressers use language to communicate in a particular situation by implication rather than by direct statement. The researcher attempts to demonstrate that the beauty and the multiple layers of meaning in poetry can be better explored if the addressee looks at the lines from a pragmatic perspective in search for implied meaning. There are many devices that can convey implied meaning in poetry, among which are 'rhetorical', 'figurative' or 'literary' devices. But
... Show MoreThis paper deals with the ideological positioning of the English poet John Donne in a selected poems of his i.e Holy Sonnet X, as regards the theme of death found therein. The researchers adopt an emerging branch of stylistics, called Critical Stylistics, as proposed by Jeffries (2010) in order to uncover the ideologies of the author regarding the topic concerned and how linguistic choices are used to slant ideas. The model is comprised of ten tools of analysis which, upon being applied to the selected data, have shown how the poet exploits language resources in order to pass his ideology and influence his readers. In this paper, the workings of only one tool are presented as applied to a certain portion of the data.
Linguistic taboos exist in most cultures. Tabooed words are generally being culturespecific
and relating to bodily functions or aspects of a culture that are sacred. Such words are
avoided, considered inappropriate and loaded with affective meaning and failing to adhere to.
Strict rules, often, governing their use and lead to punishment or public shame. These taboo
words can be used as a way of violating social deixis represented by four types of honorifics;
addressee, referent, bystander, and finally setting honorifics. This paper shows how these
taboo words are used in Kenneth Bernard's play La Justice or The Cock that Crew from the
theatre of the Ridiculous as means of violating social deixis in its four types. Th
This research deals with the color bias and its effect on maids in Mississippi in Kathryn Stockett''s (2003) The Help. The ill-treatment and negligence of Afro-American maids received from the white women who employed them in Mississippi that must have affected directly or indirectly on their personality and may eventually lead to suffering. They live in an atmosphere of struggle to free themselves from the complicated relationships between black and white. Afro-American maids pledged to liberate themselves from social oppression by protesting through writing a book which chronicles their stories in slave masters’ homes to make their presence felt as human being equal to their white masters.