Slang Investigation

Although the sentences of a certain lyric in the hip hop songs are often shortened and unfinished and sometimes, they are not grammatically correct either, composers try to arrange a group of words correctly so as to get beautiful lyrics. Hip hop songs usually tell us about human activities, violence or social criticism. In those songs, the sentence structures and the choice of words are not really paid attention to. These songs mostly present non-standard English, which tends to be vulgar, lazy in pronunciation and it is often talked about as bad, incorrect and poor English.Most of the words in the lyrics are slang words.

However, it is slang that can help composers to verbalize from the bottom of their heart. Two to the one from the one to the three. Like good puss and I like good trees. Smoke so much weed you wouldn’t believe. And I get more ass than a toilet seat (Relax).

[185] There are a number of slang Norms used in the above song such as puss ‘a woman as a sexual object’, trees, weed marijuana’, ass ‘buttocks”.Reading or listening to these words, some people who use English as a second or a foreign language may get confused in comprehending the meaning of the song lyrics because the slang words have the specific meaning.

It could be seen that studying slang is one of the interesting ways to ameliorate and develop language learners’ vocabulary. And 5 in respect of culture, language learners can get acquainted with the past and resent social life of people and understand their way of living, thinking as well as their tradition through slang.Therefore, studying slang is very important to teachers and learners of English not only to improve their comprehension but also to understand different cultures. For the reasons above, the topic entitled “An Investigation into Morphological, Semantic and Cultural Features of Slang in English Hip Hop Songs” has been chosen for my MA thesis with the hope that it will contribute something valuable to the English teaching and learning, as well as communication and translation. Aims This thesis is carried out with an aim to investigate some morphological, semantic and cultural features of slang in English hip hop songs (She’s) 1. 2. 2.

Objectives This paper is designed to reach the following objectives: – to investigate morphological and semantic features of She’s – to discover typical cultural characteristics of She’s affecting the interpretation and communication of non-native learners of English – to provide non-native learners of English with a basic knowledge of slang help them understand, use slang in speaking, and in translating effectively and naturally. To suggest some implications for English teaching and studying, translation as well as communication. Through an investigation of morphological, research. Besides, it can be used as a reference for the readers who are interested in She’s. To be equipped with the knowledge of slang, non-native learners of English in general and Vietnamese learners of English in particular will be able to comprehend such interesting and popular hip hop songs whose lyrics contain a lot of slang.