Popular Derivation and Linguistic Inquiry: Les Javanais

Abstract

THE TERM ARGOT, like other words which define linguistic varieties (language, patois, dialect, jargon) has no precise referent. Therefore, there is often some debate about what forms of linguistic behavior actually constitute argot. There are some researchers who follow Sainean in interpreting it only in its strictest sense as referring to l'ancien argot, the secret languages of the Coquillards and other bands of criminals who roamed France from the thirteenth through the nineteenth century. The present day use of the term is more liberal as evidenced by the Bibliographie des argots franpais published by Le Centre D'Argotologie of the Sorbonne in which works devoted to borrowings, specialized or technical vocabularies, and street French are found along with the more conventionally accepted forms of argot. Despite the lack of consensus concerning its denotation, most linguists recognize two general forms of argot. There is one type in which the meaning of a word is masked either because the word is coined for a specific purpose or because its original meaning has been replaced; this is the lexical form. The words flic, a coinage, and poulet, a shift in meaning, both which refer to an agent of the police, are examples of lexical argot.' The second type masks the form of a word through affixation or through the displacement of sounds and syllables within a word.2 This article follows Pl6nat in using Delvau's (1865) application of the term javanais to these kinds of secret languages in order to avoid the ambiguity and controversy of the term argot (Pl6nat Presentation 5). Verlan is one contemporary form of javanais in which, for example, the slang term poulet becomes lipou (i.e., pou.let > le(t).pou > lipou) through an inversion of syllables. The other types of structure changing argot considered in this paper are infixing javanais, where the sound sequence [-av] is inserted within a syllable (poulet > pavoulavet), and largonji des louchibiems a combination of affixation and inversion (poulet > louletpem). These forms of argot have recently attracted the attention of phonologists and this article addresses the issue of what such popular forms of derivation lend to our understanding of language structure.

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