The pragmatics of slang

1.0 Introduction

English etymology would no doubt place vocabulary labelled fam., pop. and vulg. in French under the general heading "slang". The term argot has passed into English, argot being distinguishable from slang by being more secret, less public, less generally available and, of course, "less respectable" (see Edwards 1976:23 and Spence 1986). Slang and argot possess low social value, but does this mean that they are not linguistically important? It seems to me that slang has a highly significant role to play in the linguistic life of the community, perhaps more so in French than in many other European languages. I would relate this to the rigid codification of the French standard language, which has one effect quite different from the one intended -- it triggers a proliferation of non-standard forms. These "deviant" forms cannot realistically be ignored by linguists concerned to describe the language as she is spoken.

George (1996) demonstrates brilliantly the interest contained in the morphology of contemporary French slang, but the semantics and pragmatics of slang also deserve our attention and have been conspicuously neglected in the past. This paper focuses on these aspects of the topic, following the chronological development of my own ideas:

&#bull; the traditional approach to non-standard vocabulary;
&#bull; a sociolinguistic approach -- Clermont Ferrand, and
&#bull; a pragmatic approach -- politeness theory.

2.0 The traditional approach to colloquial vocabulary

The traditional approach to slang and argot is best exemplified in the general dictionaries of French like Larousse and Robert. An essential function of dictionaries is, of course, to standardize and control linguistic usage, suppressing variation by identifying the respectable words, by excluding the most disreputable ones, and by corralling the rest into high-fenced pens from which they shall not stray (see Rey 1972). Dictionaries are expected to provide a "prescriptive taxonomy" of lexical terms -- a set of neat word-boxes, ranked into a hierarchy of good (le bon français) and bad (le français non conventionnel):

Let me emphasize that there is nothing wrong with dictionaries making prescriptive judgments of this sort -- linguistic norms are part and parcel of any standard language and part of the lexicographer's job is to codify them. Standardizing usage is an entirely legitimate function of dictionaries. However, it is desirable that readers realize that the norms being imposed are artificial and conventional, and not somehow inherent in the linguistic system itself.

Given the nature of the style-boxes found in French dictionaries, we should not be surprised to find disagreement between lexicographers over the label to be attached to particular words (see Müller 1985 and Désirat and Hordé 1976). Even the best of the French dictionaries, the Petit Robert, runs into difficulties when it comes to defining the basis of the style labels it allocates to non-standard words:

arg. = mot d'argot, emploi argotique limité à un milieu particulier, surtour professionel (arg. scol. = argot scolaire), mais inconnu du grand public. Pour les mots d'argot passés dans le langage courant voir pop.

e.g. gonzesse, pèze tire.

vulg. = mot, sens ou emploi choquant (souvent familier (= fam.) ou populaire (pop.)), qu'on ne peut employer entre personnes bien élevées, quelle due soit leur classe soiale.

e.g. con, merdier.

pop. =qualifie un mot ou un sens courant dans la langue parlée des milieux populaires (souvent ancient argot répandu) qui ne s'empoierait pas dans un milieu social élevé.

e.g. baffe, baratin.

fam. = usage parlé même écrit de la langue quotidienne: conversation etc., mais ne s'emploierait pas dans les circonstances solonnelles.

e.g. se balader, blague.

The main problem with the traditional style-labels (apart from the fact that they appear to have fossilized in the 17th century is that they are geared less to style than to a primitive form of sociology: they are based in the main on speech habits attributed conventionally to particular groups in French society. e.g.

le bon français = la bourgeoisie cultivée du Paris
le fr. pop. = le peuple de Paris
l"argot = le Milieu
le patois = la paysannerie, etc.

What we have here is a set of crude sociolinguistic stereotypes, built into a highly conservative model of French society. In fairness, I should add that the 1996 edition of the Nouveau Petit Robert has modified the definition of some of its style labels, reducing the sociological reference. I am indebted to Dr. P. Bennett of Edinburgh University who drew this to my attention.

(1) Variability is inherent in language and central to its social role. Without it we would be incapable of communicating all manner of nuances in our everyday use of language, in particular, vital information about our personal identity (along the social axis of variation) and about our relationship with the addressee (along the stylistic axis).

(2) There are no natural breaks between language varieties, no pure homogeneous styles and dialects, no neat word boxes, only gradations along social and stylistic continua. These fluid categories are are susceptible to quantificational analysis.

(3) Language variation is emphatically not "free". In other words, it is not randomly occurring or linguistically redundant and cannot be idealized away from the linguist's central concern. In fact, it correlates in a complex but nevertheless structured way with factors outside language, speaker variables like age, sex, social class, etc., and situational variables like the degree of formality, the relationship with the addressee and the like. However, these non-linguistic correlates need to be analyzed rigourously and not left to the impressionism of traditional social stereotypes.

3.1 Labovian sociolinguistics

The object of Labovian sociolinguistics is to reveal the sociolinguistic patterns underlying language variation in the community: how does language variation in language correlate with extra-linguistic factors like speech-situation and the social origin of speakers? Linguistic features which can be shown to vary in this way are referred to as "sociolinguistic variables", e.g.

in English, the presence or absence of /r/ in guard, beard, car;
in French, the presence or absence of /l/ in il faut, il vient.

In order to determine the relevant extra-linguistic correlates, the sociolinguist has to eliminate all intra-linguistic constraints (stylistic and semantic) which may influence the speaker in his use of the variable. In other words, he must identify variants which can occur in the same syntactic context and which "mean the same thing". The speaker's selection of one variant in preference to another has to spring, not from differences of syntax or denotational meaning, but from differences in the speech situation and/or the social origins of the speaker.

The results will be scalar and probabilistic rather than clear-cut: different social groups and difference speech styles can be expected to favour particular variants to a greater or lesser extent, and their use of them can be quantified and expressed in the form of a graph:

The pays d'élection of Labovian analyses is pronunciation or "accent". Speech-sounds do not of themselves carry any meaning. Different pronunciations of the same word necessarily "mean the same thing" (denotationally at least). Attempts have been made to apply this method to syntactic variation too (Coveney 1996), though the results are somewhat controversial.

In my naivety ten years ago, I started asking myself whether the Labovian method could be applied to analyzing variation in French vocabulary too. Maybe it would throw up more interesting patterns than the traditional prescriptive taxonomy of colloquialisms. Maybe we could discover a systematic correlation between the use of certain lexical variables and speech situation and/or the social origin of speakers. Intuitively, this hypothesis seemed plausible enough: low-value lexical items do seem to be used more frequently in the lower social groups and in the more informal speech styles.

Like everyone else with a reasonable familiarity with French, I was aware that there exists in that language a large number of paired items, one belonging to High style and the other to Low, denoting the same thing (often very commonly occurring objects), e.g.:

voiture = bagnole
argent = fric
médecin = toubib

3.2 The Clermont experiment

In processing the questionnaires, I was able to calculate for each informant a "slang score" according to how many jamais, rarement, souvent, très souvent he or she ticked across the fifty words. Equally, I was able to give each word an "acceptability rating" according to how many speakers had ticked jamais, rarement, souvent, très souvent alongside it. Despite the artisanal nature of my data collection, the completed questionnaires did reveal interesting patterns, findings which were entirely consonant with those of sociolinguistic surveys elsewhere.

3.2.1 Social variation

The correlation with socio-economic categories was less obvious, but was none the less present:

I

Table 1: Social Class

		U.P	N.de L.
Cadres supereiurs / Professions libérales (7)	72.1	57.2
II	Cadres moyens (12)	65.3	43.7
III	Employés (10)	88.0	85.1
IV	Ouvriers / Personnel de service (6)	74.3	69.8

If we take it that Question 1 elicited principally the speakers' vernacular style and Question 2 their more careful style, three interesting patterns emerge.

(i) The closeness of the slang scores in the highest and lowest social groups in their answer to Question 1.

(ii) The tendency of the cadres moyens to give themselves the lowest slang score. This correlates with their linguistic insecurity and their tendency to hypercorrection (cf. the "l.m.c." group in Graph 1).

(iii) The tendency of the upper groups to style-shift more markedly than the lower groups between their usage with intimates and their usage with strangers.

3.2.2 Stylistic variation

Table 2: Stylistic Variation

bouquin	167	fam.
balader	152	fam.
marre	152	fam.
marrant	147	pop.
blague	139	fam.
flic	134	pop.
boulot	132	fam.
chouette	131	pop.
moche	124	fam.
rigolo	119	fam.
trouille	119	pop.
dingue	116	fam.
bosser	115	pop.
costaud	115	fam.
pagaie	113	fam.
gaffe	110	pop.
esquinter	107	fam.
toubib	106	fam.
frousse	103	pop.
bagnoie	94	fam./pop.
fric	94	pop.
fringues	91	fam.
bousiller	86	fam.
baratin	85	pop.
cramer	84	pop.
roupiller	84	fam.
bouffer	79	fam.
con	79	fam./vulg.
mec	78	pop.
bahut	76	arg. des écoles
baffe	75	pop.
dégueulasse	75	vulg.
pognon	74	pop.
pompes	74	pop.
frangin	71	pop.
godasse	71	pop.
piaule	61	pop.
foutre	60	vulg.
nana	60	pop.
pif	55	pop.
merdier	51	vulg.
pieu	51	pop.
tifs	50	pop.
chiottes	40	pop.
clope	43	pop.
couillon	43	très fam.
gonzesse	39	vulg.
pouffiasse	36	vulg.
pèze	33	arg.
tire	26	arg.

The table reveals that, as long as we see the hierarchy of labels in stylistic, rather than social, terms, the dictionary gets the ranking more or less right. The label fam. reflects a perception that such word are quite gentils and can be used in most conversations. They occupy the top half of our ranked list. The labels vulg. and arg. reflect a perception that such words are very strong and cannot be used freely in conversation. They occupy the bottm half of our ranked list. As soon as it is the notion of social class which predominates in the lexicographer's mind, the dictionary label loses significance. So words labelled pop. occur randomly in the top and bottom halves of our list, making the value of the term so vague as to be useless.

3.3 Partial conclusion

However, the limitations of the exercise cannot be disguised. Firstly, the survey bore upon perceived use rather than actual use and it remains to be seen whether the results would have been different had I gathered hours of recordings waiting for the same sample of speakers to come up with the relevant words at home or in the railway carriage. Lexical analyses of largeish corpora of spoken French suggest that the results would not be completely different, but a reliable experiment to demonstrate this scientifically remains to be devised.

Second, the survey treated lexical pairs in the list as if they were genuine sociolinguistic variables, in other words, as if they were items sharing denotative meaning whose incidence varies according to the social origins of the speaker and according to speech style. This is no doubt the case with phonological and morphological variables, but it is less clear whether lexical variables can be treated in the same way. The difficulty here is that, if we wish to claim that pairs of words like voiture and bagnole mean the same thing we have to restrict our notion of "meaning" very severely. The words in this pair undoubtedly have the same reference (or denotational / propositional meaning), but bagnole additionally carries a pejorative connotation not present in voiture. If the variants in question have a different meaning, however slight, it is always possible to claim that a speaker's selection of one variant rather than the other is determined semantically rather than sociolinguistically, and we cease to be comparing like with like. As a speaker shifts style, is he not at the same time also changing the meaning of the message? By "meaning", I do not mean here simply the denotational or propositional meaning of the utterance, I include also the affective, connotational meanings which are conveyed at the same time. In informal situations, the messages we want to convey are different from those we wish to convey in formal situations (see Levandera 1978). The dimension of meaning reveals the limits of the quantitative Labovian paradigm. By contrast, when we move to the lexical level, style-shifting has to be seen as qualitative as well (see Stewart 1995:212-4).

Third, my survey showed that certain categories of speaker and certain situations favour the use of non-standard vocabulary more than others. However, Labovian methods provide no evidence about why this should be. In other words, they reveal no information about the function of non-standard vocabulary in our everyday interactions. When we start asking questions about the communicative function of utterances in specific real-world contexts, we are moving into the realm of linguistic pragmatics.

4.1 Guiraud

It seems to me that, while the observation of these features in colloquial vocabulary is entirely accurate, there has to be a more powerful explanation for them than the one Guiraud proposes. It is grotesque to suggest that it is only the vocabulary of uneducated speakers which exhibits these characteristics. A better explanatory model seems to me to be provided by the pragmatics of Brown and Levinson's theory of politeness.

4.2 Politeness theory

Our negative face is our desire to protect ourselves from imposition and to maintain our freedom of action. Our positive face is our desire to be accepted and appreciated by our interlocutors. All conversational encounters, such as requests, orders, reminders, threats, and warnings, involve risks to the "face" of the participants. Speakers' attempts to preserve "face" are seen in complex politeness strategies, designed to keep the interaction running smoothly.

Negative politeness strategies involve pandering to the negative face of our interlocutor. They can be summed up in the words "Don't presume!", in other words behaviour designed not to encroach on the personal space and the intimacy of the person addressed. This will involve the use of linguistic forms which protect the other person by interposing distance between the participants in the dialogue, which express deference, maximize the dignity and power of the other person, and which tend towards elf-effacement of the speaker. They will also tend to maximize the seriousness of the matter in hand, that is the gravity of our encroachment on the other's personal space.

The mechanisms of negative politeness are to be found most fully at work in the formulae of formal letter-writing conventions in French:

"Veuillez croire, Monsieur le Directeur, à L'expression de mes sentiments les plus distingués ..."

or (when writing to the Pope) (Chaffurin 1954:15-16):

Prosterné aux pieds de Votre Sainteté et implorant
la faveur de sa bénédiction apostolique,
j'ai l'honneur d'être,
Très Saint Père,
avec la plus profonde vénération
de votre Sainteté,
le très humble et très obéissant serviteur et fils.

Positive politeness strategies involve pandering to the positive face of the interlocutor. They can be summed up in the words "Presume as much as you like!" because both parties want to share their space and cooperate on equal terms. Here it is the ethic of solidarity, not that of power and deference, which predominates. It would be regarded as unfriendly in these circumstances to use linguistic forms marking social distance and a power difference between the speakers. It would be uncooperative to stand on one's dignity.

Politeness theory predicts that linguistic forms expressing positive politeness will therefore have four main features. First, they will tend to belittle the gravity of the topics being discussed and will often be jokey and irreverent.

Second, they will refer quite freely to topics pertaining to the intimacy of the addressee, e.g. money, bodily functions and sex.

Third, they will claim in-group membership with the interlocutor by assuming shared knowledge and using familiar, in-group vocabulary. There will be no need to spell everything out, as the interlocutors will know what is being referred to, so elliptical forms will be entirely appropriate.

Fourth, people will wish to carry this affirmation of in-group solidarity further by developing their own members-only vocabulary with the express intention of distinguishing members of the group from those outside. This would involve repeated generation of new items to enable core members of the group to remain constantly ahead of the game, hence the proliferation of séries synonymiques and lexical codes like verlan with the creation ad infinitum of new lexical forms for in-group use. Argot is a form of deviance, a gesture of defiance against the straight world. Crooks may or may not have recourse to such strategies, but tot suggest that they are its principal perpetrators is absurd.

We can see from this list of the linguistic exponents of positive politeness that they correspond closely to the characteristics Guiraud noted as being present in French colloquial vocabulary and which he attributed essentially to lower-class speakers. As we saw in Clermont-Ferrand, the "working classes" are not the only ones who use colloquial vocabulary. Upper class speakers commonly use in their own informal style linguistic forms which they attribute to lower social groups. Slang is a common resource available to all speakers. Register (or speech situation) is a much more basic determinant of their use than the dialect (social origins) of the speaker (see Finnegan and Biber 1994).

I went on to show that the methods of Labovian sociolinguistics can reveal certain interesting correlations between use of colloquial vocabulary and speaker variables like age and sex, and, up to a point, social class. It emerged that speech situation (register) is probably a more basic determinant of vernacular use than the social origins of the speaker (dialect).

Labovian sociolinguistics cannot provide all the answers, however. It is in fact of very little help when it comes to understanding the social function of this part of the lexicon. For this we have to look beyond Labovian sociolinguistics to pragmatics. Here I believe politeness theory has real help to offer, for colloquial vocabulary seems to play a central role in positive politeness strategies.

There is, however, a twist in the tail in this demolition of traditional approaches to slang: it is clear, when we look at Labov's graphs, that the association of vernacular speech forms with less educated speakers is by no means gratuitous. It was B. Bernstein in the 1970s who probed deeply into the relationship between language and social class, particularly in the sphere of education. Bernstein (1974) drew a distinction between "elaborated" and "restricted" codes, the former being explicit and universalistic use of language, the latter being implicit and context-bound. He argued that by their lifestyle and social network patterns, middle class speakers have greater access to elaborated code than working class speakers who remain ore or less limited to restricted code. Bernstein's "Language Deficit Hypothesis" maintained that differential access to elaborated code helps explain the lower achievement of working-class children in schools. Since schooling is conducted primarily in elaborated code, middle-class pupils by their home background have an unbeatable start in the education race from the very beginning.

It seems to me that Bernstein's distinction between elaborated and restricted codes is somewhat analogous to Brown and Levinson's theory of politeness: the distinction can be assigned to negative-politeness versus positive-politeness preferences in linguistic expression. Moreover, Brown and Levinson suggest (1987:246) that in complex societies dominated social groups have positive politeness cultures; dominating groups have negative politeness cultures. So maybe the traditional subjective association of slang with the workers has some foundation in empirical reality after all.

Bibliography

Brown, P. and S. Levinson, 1987. Politeness. Some Universals of Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chaffurin, L., 1954. Le Parfait Secrétaire. Paris: Larousse.

Coveney, A., 1996. Variability in Spoken French. A Sociolinguistic Study of Interrogation and Negation. Exeter: Elm Bank Publications.

Désirat, C. and T. Hordé, 1976. La Langue française au XXe siècle. Paris: Bordas.

Edwards, A. D., 1976. Language in Culture and Class. London: Heinemann.

Finegan, E. and D. Biber, 1994. Register and social dialect variation. In: D. Biber and E. Finegan (eds), Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Register. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 315-347.

François, D., 1968. Les argots. In: A. Martinet (ed.), Le Langage. Paris: Gallimard. 622-646.

George, K., 1996. De la belle ouvrage: cross-gendering in unconventional French. In: Journal of French Language Studies 7.163-175.

Guiraud, P., 1973. L'Argot. Paris: PUF (Que Sais-Je?)

-- 1978. Le Français populaire. Paris: PUF (Que Sais-Je?)

Labov, W., 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Lavandera, B., 1978. Where does the sociolinguistic variable stop? Language in Society 7.171-182.

Lefkowitz, N., 1991. vTalking Backwards. Looking Forwards. Tübingen: Narr.

Lodge, R. A., 1989. Speakers' perceptions of non-standard vocabulary in French. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 105.427-444.

Masselaar, P. M., 1968. Les marques 'familier' et 'populaire' de vue lexicologique et lexicographique. Cahiers de lexicologie 53.91-106.

Massian, M., XXX. Et Si l'on Ecrivait Correctement le Français? XXX:XXX.

Müller, B., 1985. Le Français d'aujourd'hui. Paris: Klincksieck.

Niceforo, A., 1912. Le Génie de l'argot. Paris: Mercure de France.

vPetit Robert. Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue française. Paris: Société du Nouveau Littré, 1968.

Rey, A., 1972. Usages, jugements et prescriptions linguistiques. Langue française 16:4-28.

Sainéan, L. 1912. Les Sources de l'argot ancien. Paris: Champion.

Spence, N. C. W., 1986. French argot and English slang. French Studies 40:257-268.

Stewart, M., 1995. The strategic use of on. Journal of French Language Studies, 5:203-223.

von Wartburg, W., 1962. Évolution et structure de la langue française. Berne: Francke. (8th edn.)

Wheeler, M., forthcoming. 'Politeness' and sociolinguistic theory. Folia Linguistica.

Appendix A: The WORDS

Appendix B: The SPEAKERS

Appendix C: The QUESTIONS