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77-517: A slang is a vocabulary (words, phrases , and linguistic usages ) of an informal register , common in everyday conversation but avoided in formal writing. It also often refers to the language exclusively used by the members of particular in-groups in order to establish group identity , exclude outsiders, or both. The word itself came about in the 18th century and has been defined in multiple ways since its conception, with no single technical usage in linguistics. In its earliest attested use (1756),

154-820: A lexicon ) is a set of words , typically the set in a language or the set known to an individual. The word vocabulary originated from the Latin vocabulum , meaning "a word, name". It forms an essential component of language and communication , helping convey thoughts, ideas, emotions, and information. Vocabulary can be oral , written , or signed and can be categorized into two main types: active vocabulary (words one uses regularly) and passive vocabulary (words one recognizes but does not use often). An individual's vocabulary continually evolves through various methods, including direct instruction , independent reading , and natural language exposure, but it can also shrink due to forgetting , trauma , or disease . Furthermore, vocabulary

231-537: A broad, empirical window into the motivating forces behind slang. While many forms of lexicon may be considered low-register or "sub-standard", slang remains distinct from colloquial and jargon terms because of its specific social contexts . While viewed as inappropriate in formal usage, colloquial terms are typically considered acceptable in speech across a wide range of contexts, whereas slang tends to be perceived as inappropriate in many common communication situations. Jargon refers to language used by personnel in

308-438: A child's thoughts become more reliant on their ability to self-express without relying on gestures or babbling. Once the reading and writing vocabularies start to develop, through questions and education , the child starts to discover the anomalies and irregularities of language. In first grade , a child who can read learns about twice as many words as one who cannot. Generally, this gap does not narrow later. This results in

385-471: A language over time. The 1941 film, Ball of Fire , portrays a professor played by Gary Cooper who is researching and writing an encyclopedia article about slang. The 2006 film, Idiocracy , portrays a less intelligent society in the year 2505 that has people who use all various sorts of aggressive slang. These slangs sound very foreign and alienating to the protagonist of the movie, a US Army librarian. Vocabulary A vocabulary (also known as

462-431: A limited vocabulary for rapid language proficiency or for effective communication. These include Basic English (850 words), Special English (1,500 words), General Service List (2,000 words), and Academic Word List . Some learner's dictionaries have developed defining vocabularies which contain only most common and basic words. As a result, word definitions in such dictionaries can be understood even by learners with

539-529: A limited vocabulary. Some publishers produce dictionaries based on word frequency or thematic groups. The Swadesh list was made for investigation in linguistics . Focal vocabulary is a specialized set of terms and distinctions that is particularly important to a certain group: those with a particular focus of experience or activity. A lexicon, or vocabulary, is a language's dictionary: its set of names for things, events, and ideas. Some linguists believe that lexicon influences people's perception of things,

616-522: A measure of language processing and cognitive development. It can serve as an indicator of intellectual ability or cognitive status, with vocabulary tests often forming part of intelligence and neuropsychological assessments . Word has a variety of meanings, and our understand of ideas such as vocabulary size differ depending on the definition used. The most common definition equates words with lemmas (the inflected or dictionary form; this includes walk , but not walks, walked or walking ). Most of

693-405: A mental image, or when discriminating between false friends, rote memorization is the method to use. A neural network model of novel word learning across orthographies, accounting for L1-specific memorization abilities of L2-learners has recently been introduced (Hadzibeganovic and Cannas, 2009). One way of learning vocabulary is to use mnemonic devices or to create associations between words, this

770-463: A particular field or to language used to represent specific terms within a field to those with a particular interest. Although jargon and slang can both be used to exclude non-group members from the conversation, slang tends to emphasize social and contextual understanding whereas the main purpose of jargon is to optimize communication using terms that imply technical understanding. While colloquialisms and jargon may seem like slang because they reference

847-424: A particular group, they do not necessarily fit the same definition because they do not represent a particular effort to replace the general lexicon of a standard language . Colloquialisms are considered more acceptable and more expected in standard usage than slang is, and jargon is often created to talk about aspects of a particular field that are not accounted for in the general lexicon. However, this differentiation

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924-424: A person's "final vocabulary". Those words are as far as he can go with language; beyond them is only helpless passivity or a resort to force. ( Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity p. 73) During its infancy, a child instinctively builds a vocabulary. Infants imitate words that they hear and then associate those words with objects and actions. This is the listening vocabulary . The speaking vocabulary follows, as

1001-476: A qualitative manner. The text-corpus method uses the body of texts in any natural language to derive the set of abstract rules which govern that language. Those results can be used to explore the relationships between that subject language and other languages which have undergone a similar analysis. The first such corpora were manually derived from source texts, but now that work is automated. Corpora have not only been used for linguistics research, they have since

1078-477: A slang term removes its status as true slang because it is then accepted by the media and is thus no longer the special insider speech of a particular group. For example, Black American music frequently uses slang, and many of its frequently used terms have therefore become part of vernacular English. Some say that a general test for whether a word is slang or not is whether or not it would be acceptable in an academic or legal setting, but that would consider slang to be

1155-419: A specific social significance having to do with the group the term indexes. Coleman also suggests that slang is differentiated within more general semantic change in that it typically has to do with a certain degree of "playfulness". The development of slang is considered to be a largely "spontaneous, lively, and creative" speech process. Still, while a great deal of slang takes off, even becoming accepted into

1232-702: A wide range of vocabulary by age five or six, when an English-speaking child will have learned about 1500 words. Vocabulary grows throughout one's life. Between the ages of 20 and 60, people learn about 6,000 more lemmas, or one every other day. An average 20-year-old knows 42,000 lemmas coming from 11,100 word families. People expand their vocabularies by e.g. reading, playing word games , and participating in vocabulary-related programs. Exposure to traditional print media teaches correct spelling and vocabulary, while exposure to text messaging leads to more relaxed word acceptability constraints. Estimating average vocabulary size poses various difficulties and limitations due to

1309-436: A word, some of which are not hierarchical so their acquisition does not necessarily follow a linear progression suggested by degree of knowledge . Several frameworks of word knowledge have been proposed to better operationalise this concept. One such framework includes nine facets: Listed in order of most ample to most limited: A person's reading vocabulary is all the words recognized when reading. This class of vocabulary

1386-579: A writer may prefer one synonym over another, and they will be unlikely to use technical vocabulary relating to a subject in which they have no interest or knowledge. The American philosopher Richard Rorty characterized a person's "final vocabulary" as follows: All human beings carry about a set of words which they employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives. These are the words in which we formulate praise of our friends and contempt for our enemies, our long-term projects, our deepest self-doubts and our highest hopes... I shall call these words

1463-476: Is used). Other publishers followed suit. The British publisher Collins' COBUILD monolingual learner's dictionary , designed for users learning English as a foreign language , was compiled using the Bank of English . The Survey of English Usage Corpus was used in the development of one of the most important Corpus-based Grammars, which was written by Quirk et al. and published in 1985 as A Comprehensive Grammar of

1540-704: Is a "Sandhi-split corpus of Sanskrit texts with full morphological and lexical analysis... designed for text-historical research in Sanskrit linguistics and philology." Besides pure linguistic inquiry, researchers had begun to apply corpus linguistics to other academic and professional fields, such as the emerging sub-discipline of Law and Corpus Linguistics , which seeks to understand legal texts using corpus data and tools. The DBLP Discovery Dataset concentrates on computer science , containing relevant computer science publications with sentient metadata such as author affiliations, citations, or study fields. A more focused dataset

1617-401: Is a significant focus of study across various disciplines, like linguistics , education , psychology , and artificial intelligence . Vocabulary is not limited to single words; it also encompasses multi-word units known as collocations , idioms , and other types of phraseology. Acquiring an adequate vocabulary is one of the largest challenges in learning a second language . A vocabulary is

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1694-441: Is an established method for memorization, particularly used for vocabulary acquisition in computer-assisted language learning . Other methods typically require more time and longer to recall. Some words cannot be easily linked through association or other methods. When a word in the second language is phonologically or visually similar to a word in the native language, one often assumes they also share similar meanings . Though this

1771-634: Is especially awesome and "hype". Words and phrases from popular Hollywood films and television series frequently become slang. One early slang-like code, thieves' cant , was first used in England in around the year 1600 as a way of law-breakers to communicate without the authorities knowing of what they were saying. Slang is usually associated with a particular social group and plays a role in constructing identity. While slang outlines social space, attitudes about slang partly construct group identity and identify individuals as members of groups. Therefore, using

1848-494: Is frequently the case, it is not always true. When faced with a false friend , memorization and repetition are the keys to mastery. If a second language learner relies solely on word associations to learn new vocabulary, that person will have a very difficult time mastering false friends. When large amounts of vocabulary must be acquired in a limited amount of time, when the learner needs to recall information quickly, when words represent abstract concepts or are difficult to picture in

1925-440: Is generally a subset of the listening vocabulary. Due to the spontaneous nature of speech, words are often misused slightly and unintentionally, but facial expressions and tone of voice can compensate for this misuse. The written word appears in registers as different as formal essays and social media feeds. While many written words rarely appear in speech, a person's written vocabulary is generally limited by preference and context:

2002-427: Is generally the most ample, as new words are more commonly encountered when reading than when listening. A person's listening vocabulary comprises the words recognized when listening to speech. Cues such as the speaker's tone and gestures, the topic of discussion, and the conversation's social context may convey the meaning of an unfamiliar word. A person's speaking vocabulary comprises the words used in speech and

2079-532: Is known as the "keyword method" (Sagarra and Alba, 2006). It also takes a long time to implement — and takes a long time to recollect — but because it makes a few new strange ideas connect it may help in learning. Also it presumably does not conflict with Paivio's dual coding system because it uses visual and verbal mental faculties. However, this is still best used for words that represent concrete things, as abstract concepts are more difficult to remember. Several word lists have been developed to provide people with

2156-656: Is known as third-order indexicality. As outlined in Elisa Mattiello's book "An Introduction to English Slang", a slang term can assume several levels of meaning and can be used for many reasons connected with identity. For example, male adolescents use the terms "foxy" and "shagadelic" to "show their belonging to a band, to stress their virility or their age, to reinforce connection with their peer group and to exclude outsiders, to show off, etc." These two examples use both traditional and nontraditional methods of word formation to create words with more meaning and expressiveness than

2233-579: Is not consistently applied by linguists; the terms "slang" and "jargon" are sometimes treated as synonymous, and the scope of "jargon" is at times extended to mean all forms of socially-restricted language. It is often difficult to differentiate slang from colloquialisms and even high-register lexicon because slang generally becomes accepted into common vocabulary over time. Words such as "spurious" and "strenuous" were once perceived as slang, but they are now considered general, even high-register words. Some literature on slang even says that mainstream acceptance of

2310-531: Is now available through a web interface. The first computerized corpus of transcribed spoken language was constructed in 1971 by the Montreal French Project, containing one million words, which inspired Shana Poplack 's much larger corpus of spoken French in the Ottawa-Hull area. In the 1990s, many of the notable early successes on statistical methods in natural-language programming (NLP) occurred in

2387-418: Is one of the first steps in learning a second language, but a learner never finishes vocabulary acquisition. Whether in one's native language or a second language, the acquisition of new vocabulary is an ongoing process. There are many techniques that help one acquire new vocabulary. Although memorization can be seen as tedious or boring, associating one word in the native language with the corresponding word in

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2464-417: Is usually the larger of the two. For example, although a young child may not yet be able to speak, write, or sign, they may be able to follow simple commands and appear to understand a good portion of the language to which they are exposed. In this case, the child's receptive vocabulary is likely tens, if not hundreds of words, but their active vocabulary is zero. When that child learns to speak or sign, however,

2541-682: The International Corpus of English , and the British National Corpus , a 100 million word collection of a range of spoken and written texts, created in the 1990s by a consortium of publishers, universities ( Oxford and Lancaster ) and the British Library . For contemporary American English, work has stalled on the American National Corpus , but the 400+ million word Corpus of Contemporary American English (1990–present)

2618-572: The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis . For example, the Nuer of Sudan have an elaborate vocabulary to describe cattle. The Nuer have dozens of names for cattle because of the cattle's particular histories, economies, and environments . This kind of comparison has elicited some linguistic controversy, as with the number of " Eskimo words for snow ". English speakers with relevant specialised knowledge can also display elaborate and precise vocabularies for snow and cattle when

2695-453: The Survey of English Usage team ( University College , London), who advocate annotation as allowing greater linguistic understanding through rigorous recording. Some of the earliest efforts at grammatical description were based at least in part on corpora of particular religious or cultural significance. For example, Prātiśākhya literature described the sound patterns of Sanskrit as found in

2772-613: The Vedas , and Pāṇini 's grammar of classical Sanskrit was based at least in part on analysis of that same corpus. Similarly, the early Arabic grammarians paid particular attention to the language of the Quran . In the Western European tradition, scholars prepared concordances to allow detailed study of the language of the Bible and other canonical texts. A landmark in modern corpus linguistics

2849-508: The 1969 been increasingly used to compile dictionaries (starting with The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language in 1969) and reference grammars, with A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language , published in 1985, as a first. Experts in the field have differing views about the annotation of a corpus. These views range from John McHardy Sinclair , who advocates minimal annotation so texts speak for themselves, to

2926-530: The 1970s, in which every clause is parsed using graphs representing up to seven levels of syntax, and every segment tagged with seven fields of information. The Quranic Arabic Corpus is an annotated corpus for the Classical Arabic language of the Quran . This is a recent project with multiple layers of annotation including morphological segmentation, part-of-speech tagging , and syntactic analysis using dependency grammar. The Digital Corpus of Sanskrit (DCS)

3003-449: The 3000 most frequent English word families or the 5000 most frequent words provides 95% vocabulary coverage of spoken discourse. For minimal reading comprehension a threshold of 3,000 word families (5,000 lexical items) was suggested and for reading for pleasure 5,000 word families (8,000 lexical items) are required. An "optimal" threshold of 8,000 word families yields the coverage of 98% (including proper nouns). Learning vocabulary

3080-512: The Brown Corpus to a variety of computational analyses and then combined elements of linguistics, language teaching, psychology , statistics, and sociology to create a rich and variegated opus. A further key publication was Randolph Quirk 's "Towards a description of English Usage" in 1960 in which he introduced the Survey of English Usage . Quirk's corpus was the first modern corpus to be built with

3157-595: The English Language . The Brown Corpus has also spawned a number of similarly structured corpora: the LOB Corpus (1960s British English ), Kolhapur ( Indian English ), Wellington ( New Zealand English ), Australian Corpus of English ( Australian English ), the Frown Corpus (early 1990s American English ), and the FLOB Corpus (1990s British English). Other corpora represent many languages, varieties and modes, and include

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3234-625: The National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics in Japan has built a number of corpora of spoken and written Japanese. Sign language corpora have also been created using video data. Besides these corpora of living languages, computerized corpora have also been made of collections of texts in ancient languages. An example is the Andersen -Forbes database of the Hebrew Bible, developed since

3311-440: The child's active vocabulary begins to increase. It is also possible for the productive vocabulary to be larger than the receptive vocabulary, for example in a second-language learner who has learned words through study rather than exposure, and can produce them, but has difficulty recognizing them in conversation. Productive vocabulary, therefore, generally refers to words that can be produced within an appropriate context and match

3388-405: The complete set of symbols and signs in a sign system or a text, extending the definition beyond purely verbal communication to encompass other forms of symbolic communication. Vocabulary acquisition is a central aspect of language education, as it directly impacts reading comprehension, expressive and receptive language skills, and academic achievement. Vocabulary is examined in psychology as

3465-529: The definition used. The first major change distinction that must be made when evaluating word knowledge is whether the knowledge is productive (also called achieve or active) or receptive (also called receive or passive); even within those opposing categories, there is often no clear distinction. Words that are generally understood when heard or read or seen constitute a person's receptive vocabulary. These words may range from well known to barely known (see degree of knowledge below). A person's receptive vocabulary

3542-574: The different definitions and methods employed such as what is the word, what is to know a word, what sample dictionaries were used, how tests were conducted, and so on. Native speakers' vocabularies also vary widely within a language, and are dependent on the level of the speaker's education. As a result, estimates vary from 10,000 to 17,000 word families or 17,000-42,000 dictionary words for young adult native speakers of English. A 2016 study shows that 20-year-old English native speakers recognize on average 42,000 lemmas , ranging from 27,100 for

3619-403: The early 2000s along with the rise in popularity of social networking services, including Facebook , Twitter , and Instagram . This has spawned new vocabularies associated with each new social media venue, such as the use of the term "friending" on Facebook, which is a verbification of "friend" used to describe the process of adding a new person to one's group of friends on the website, despite

3696-447: The existence of an analogous term "befriend". This term is much older than Facebook, but has only recently entered the popular lexicon. Other examples of slang in social media demonstrate a proclivity toward shortened words or acronyms. These are especially associated with services such as Twitter, which (as of November 2017) has a 280-character limit for each message and therefore requires a relatively brief mode of expression. This includes

3773-567: The field of machine translation , due especially to work at IBM Research. These systems were able to take advantage of existing multilingual textual corpora that had been produced by the Parliament of Canada and the European Union as a result of laws calling for the translation of all governmental proceedings into all official languages of the corresponding systems of government. There are corpora in non-European languages as well. For example,

3850-436: The first to report on the phenomenon of slang in a systematic and linguistic way, postulated that a term would likely be in circulation for a decade before it would be written down. Nevertheless, it seems that slang generally forms via deviation from a standard form. This "spawning" of slang occurs in much the same way that any general semantic change might occur. The difference here is that the slang term's new meaning takes on

3927-421: The floor laughing"), which are widely used in instant messaging on the internet. As subcultures are often forms of counterculture, which is understood to oppose the norm, it follows that slang has come to be associated with counterculture. Slang is often adopted from social media as a sign of social awareness and shared knowledge of popular culture . This type known as internet slang has become prevalent since

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4004-530: The hippie slang of the 1960s. The word "gig" is now a widely accepted synonym for a concert, recital, or performance of any type. Generally, slang terms undergo the same processes of semantic change that words in the regular lexicon do. Slang often forms from words with previously differing meanings, one example is the often used and popular slang word "lit", which was created by a generation labeled "Generation Z". The word itself used to be associated with something being on fire or being "lit" up until 1988 when it

4081-416: The intended meaning of the speaker or signer. As with receptive vocabulary, however, there are many degrees at which a particular word may be considered part of an active vocabulary. Knowing how to pronounce, sign, or write a word does not necessarily mean that the word that has been used correctly or accurately reflects the intended message; but it does reflect a minimal amount of productive knowledge. Within

4158-430: The lack of a clear definition, however, Bethany K. Dumas and Jonathan Lighter argue that an expression should be considered "true slang" if it meets at least two of the following criteria: Michael Adams remarks that "[Slang] is liminal language... it is often impossible to tell, even in context, which interests and motives it serves... slang is on the edge." Slang dictionaries, collecting thousands of slang entries, offer

4235-645: The lowest 5% of the population to 51,700 lemmas for the highest 5%. These lemmas come from 6,100 word families in the lowest 5% of the population and 14,900 word families in the highest 5%. 60-year-olds know on average 6,000 lemmas more. According to another, earlier 1995 study junior-high students would be able to recognize the meanings of about 10,000–12,000 words, whereas for college students this number grows up to about 12,000–17,000 and for elderly adults up to about 17,000 or more. For native speakers of German, average absolute vocabulary sizes range from 5,900 lemmas in first grade to 73,000 for adults. The knowledge of

4312-427: The more direct and traditional words "sexy" and "beautiful": From the semantic point of view, slangy foxy is more loaded than neutral sexy in terms of information provided. That is, for young people foxy means having the quality of: (1) attracting interest, attention, affection, (2) causing desire, (3) excellent or admirable in appearance, and (4) sexually provocative, exciting, etc., whereas sexy only refers to

4389-444: The need arises. Corpus linguistics Corpus linguistics proposes that a reliable analysis of a language is more feasible with corpora collected in the field—the natural context ("realia") of that language—with minimal experimental interference. Large collections of text, though corpora may also be small in terms of running words, allow linguists to run quantitative analyses on linguistic concepts that may be difficult to test in

4466-514: The possibility of a Scandinavian origin, suggesting the same root as that of sling , which means "to throw", and noting that slang is thrown language – a quick and honest way to make your point. Linguists have no simple and clear definition of slang but agree that it is a constantly changing linguistic phenomenon present in every subculture worldwide. Some argue that slang exists because we must come up with ways to define new experiences that have surfaced with time and modernity. Attempting to remedy

4543-427: The purpose of representing the whole language. Shortly thereafter, Boston publisher Houghton-Mifflin approached Kučera to supply a million-word, three-line citation base for its new American Heritage Dictionary , the first dictionary compiled using corpus linguistics. The AHD took the innovative step of combining prescriptive elements (how language should be used) with descriptive information (how it actually

4620-686: The quality indicated in point (4). Matiello stresses that those agents who identify themselves as "young men" have "genuinely coined" these terms and choose to use them over "canonical" terms —like beautiful or sexy—because of the indexicalized social identifications the former convey. In terms of first and second order indexicality, the usage of speaker-oriented terms by male adolescents indicated their membership to their age group, to reinforce connection to their peer group, and to exclude outsiders. In terms of higher order indexicality, anyone using these terms may desire to appear fresher, undoubtedly more playful, faddish, and colourful than someone who employs

4697-457: The receptive–productive distinction lies a range of abilities that are often referred to as degree of knowledge . This simply indicates that a word gradually enters a person's vocabulary over a period of time as more aspects of word knowledge are learnt. Roughly, these stages could be described as: The differing degrees of word knowledge imply a greater depth of knowledge , but the process is more complex than that. There are many facets to knowing

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4774-506: The same as normal, everyday, informal language. Others say that a general test is whether the word has been entered in the Oxford English Dictionary, which some scholars claim changes its status as slang. It is often difficult to collect etymologies for slang terms, largely because slang is a phenomenon of speech, rather than written language and etymologies which are typically traced via corpus . Eric Partridge , cited as

4851-461: The second language until memorized is considered one of the best methods of vocabulary acquisition. By the time students reach adulthood, they generally have gathered a number of personalized memorization methods. Although many argue that memorization does not typically require the complex cognitive processing that increases retention (Sagarra and Alba, 2006), it does typically require a large amount of repetition, and spaced repetition with flashcards

4928-578: The set of words in a given language that an individual knows and uses. In the context of linguistics , a vocabulary may refer more broadly to any set of words. Types of vocabularies have been further defined: a lexis is a vocabulary comprising all words used in a language or other linguistic context or in a person's lexical repertoire. An individual person's vocabulary includes an passive vocabulary of words they can recognize or understand, as well as an active vocabulary of words they regularly use in speech and writing. In semiotics , vocabulary refers to

5005-469: The slang of a particular group associates an individual with that group. Michael Silverstein 's orders of indexicality can be employed to assign a slang term as a second-order index to that particular group. Using a slang term, however, can also give an individual the qualities associated with the term's group of origin, whether or not the individual is trying to identify as a member of the group. This allocation of qualities based on abstract group association

5082-492: The socially preferable or "correct" ways to speak, according to a language's normative grammar and syntactical words, descriptivists focus on studying language to further understand the subconscious rules of how individuals speak, which makes slang important in understanding such rules. Noam Chomsky , a founder of anthropological linguistic thought, challenged structural and prescriptive grammar and began to study sounds and morphemes functionally, as well as their changes within

5159-435: The standard English term "beautiful". This appearance relies heavily on the hearer's third-order understanding of the term's associated social nuances and presupposed use-cases. Often, distinct subcultures will create slang that members will use in order to associate themselves with the group, or to delineate outsiders. Slang terms are often known only within a clique or ingroup . For example, Leet ("Leetspeak" or "1337")

5236-400: The standard lexicon, much slang dies out, sometimes only referencing a group. An example of this is the term "groovy" which is a relic of 1960s and 70s American hippie slang. Nevertheless, for a slang term to become a slang term, people must use it, at some point in time, as a way to flout standard language. Additionally, slang terms may be borrowed between groups, such as the term "gig" which

5313-451: The time lemmas do not include proper nouns (names of people, places, companies, etc.). Another definition often used in research of vocabulary size is that of word family . These are all the words that can be derived from a ground word (e.g., the words effortless, effortlessly, effortful, effortfully are all part of the word family effort ). Estimates of vocabulary size range from as high as 200 thousand to as low as 10 thousand, depending on

5390-449: The use of hashtags which explicitly state the main content of a message or image, such as #food or #photography. Some critics believe that when slang becomes more commonplace it effectively eradicates the "proper" use of a certain language. However, academic (descriptive) linguists believe that language is not static but ever-changing and that slang terms are valid words within a language's lexicon. While prescriptivists study and promote

5467-490: The word slang referred to the vocabulary of "low" or "disreputable" people. By the early nineteenth century, it was no longer exclusively associated with disreputable people, but continued to be applied to usages below the level of standard educated speech. In Scots dialect it meant "talk, chat, gossip", as used by Aberdeen poet William Scott in 1832: "The slang gaed on aboot their war'ly care." In northern English dialect it meant "impertinence, abusive language". The origin of

5544-551: The word "slang" is unclear. It was first used in print around 1800 to refer to the language of the disreputable and criminal classes in London, though its usage likely dates back further. A Scandinavian origin has been proposed (compare, for example, Norwegian slengenavn , which means "nickname"), but based on "date and early associations" is discounted by the Oxford English Dictionary . Jonathon Green , however, agrees with

5621-409: Was first used in writing to indicate a person who was drunk in the book "Warbirds: Diary of an Unknown Aviator". Since this time "lit" has gained popularity through Rap songs such as ASAP Rocky's "Get Lit" in 2011. As the popularity of the word has increased so too has the number of different meanings associated with the word. Now "lit" describes a person who is drunk and/or high, as well as an event that

5698-734: Was introduced by NLP Scholar, a combination of papers of the ACL Anthology and Google Scholar metadata. Corpora can also aid in translation efforts or in teaching foreign languages. Corpus linguistics has generated a number of research methods, which attempt to trace a path from data to theory. Wallis and Nelson (2001) first introduced what they called the 3A perspective: Annotation, Abstraction and Analysis. Most lexical corpora today are part-of-speech-tagged (POS-tagged). However even corpus linguists who work with 'unannotated plain text' inevitably apply some method to isolate salient terms. In such situations annotation and abstraction are combined in

5775-444: Was originally coined by jazz musicians in the 1930s and then borrowed into the same hippie slang of the 1960s. 'The word "groovy" has remained a part of subculture lexicon since its popularization. It is still in common use today by a significant population. The word "gig" to refer to a performance very likely originated well before the 1930s, and remained a common term throughout the 1940s and 1950s before becoming vaguely associated with

5852-493: Was originally popular only among certain internet subcultures such as software crackers and online video gamers. During the 1990s, and into the early 21st century, however, Leet became increasingly commonplace on the internet, and it has spread outside internet-based communication and into spoken languages. Other types of slang include SMS language used on mobile phones, and "chatspeak", (e.g., " LOL ", an acronym meaning "laughing out loud" or "laugh out loud" or ROFL , "rolling on

5929-535: Was the publication of Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English in 1967. Written by Henry Kučera and W. Nelson Francis , the work was based on an analysis of the Brown Corpus , which is a structured and balanced corpus of one million words of American English from the year 1961. The corpus comprises 2000 text samples, from a variety of genres. The Brown Corpus was the first computerized corpus designed for linguistic research. Kučera and Francis subjected

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