The social significance of slang

Abstract

It is well-established within linguistics that slang serves a group-identifying function. In this paper, a new understanding of the notion of lexical metadata is developed to provide a philosophical treatment of said function. The proposed account explains the group-identifying function of slang in terms of certain inferences about a speaker's group affiliations that people competent with a slang word will be disposed to make given the lexical metadata related to the word in question. The resulting view is theoretically simple and may extend to a whole range of linguistic phenomena that speakers utilize to position themselves in social space.