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energetic, colorful or funny feature(Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Thesaurus).” Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Advanced English defines it as “Very informal language that includes new and sometimes not polite words and meanings, is often used among particular groups of people and is usually, not used in serious speech or writing(Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Advanced English).” Accordingly we learned that in general, first of all, different from standard language, slang is a king of non-standard language, which has the characteristics of fashion, but lost in vulgarian. Secondly, it is often prevalent in a particular population, used as their special language. Finally, it does not use in formal conversation and article, it is unqualified to take its place in the higher circles. American poet Walt Whitman said, “if the language is compared to the dominating emperor, then in the magnificent halls,
one person who likes clown-type figure come out from Shakespeare characters, he jumps onto the seat, even in the most solemn festival, that is a slang, or an insinuation.”
However, from the development trend of slang, if we hold the attitude of keeping pace with the time to observe, we will soon find definition of the slang beneath the biases of “Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Advanced English”. Following, I will do a more
detailed discussion from emergence and development，function and characteristics and feature
trends of several aspects of American slangs to readers.
2.2 The predecessors’ researches of American slang
American slang, as a kind of informal language, has been used in public for many years. It follows that if we want to learn more about modern English, we need to know about the American slang.
Chinese scholars, like Wang Li and Zhou Tian, whose data analysis and quantitative study also have confirmed that the function of the American slang is associated with the social conventions.
Dr. Albert Croll Baugh ， Chaired the University of Pennsylvania Department of
English，has done lots of researches about it and written a book about this topic.
3. Provenance and features of the American slang
3.1 Provenance of the slang
The slang came into being since it has human language. In the 19th century, a movement called “Westward Movement” in the American continent ， a large number of American migrated towards the west, causing the large-scale population flow. Thus, each of
the local dialect and jargon of various social strata came in one after another. People emulated and improved the language(Baugh 15). As American officials did not emphasize the “literary language”, and seldom conducted “language purification” and all that activities, thus different forms of the language of the emerging jargon and colloquialisms through constantly spread and wildly use, has become the slangs used by Americans today. Meanwhile, the United文献综述
States is not only a mixture of different ethnic immigrant country, but also continued to create a new vocabulary for integration with the American language, so that the slangs increased with each passing day. The appearance of the slang is associated with our society, cultural and our race. American slang is extremely innovative, lively, visual and positive. It’s truly a living language, and attractive magnetic field is formed not only in the modern American society, television, radio, novels, newspapers and magazines, as well as the day-to-day conversation. What’s more, some slang is popular on the global scale. Up to now, there are at least five existing forms of slang. I am going to describe them in details.