On The Characteristics And Social Functions Of American Slangs In "Sex And The City"

American slangs is of a complicated language phenomenon. American slangs words and terms indicate the characteristics of American culture, American people and the American society. Most Chinese English learners may have the experience:when watching American films or TV series without Chinese translation, they cannot fully understand the language of the films. The reason for that is that there are many slang words and terms or idioms in American films or TV series. But we not often engage these slang terms. Americans often use slang terms in their daily English. Statistics suggests that slang words and expressions take up ten percent of the vocabulary of American English on average.Along with the global interactions, more and more countries are involved in the connection of the United States; therefore, its language will become more influential. The study of American slangs can hopefully to help us improve our English and its culture, which can facilitate the communication with people from countries.The main research methods of this thesis are concept explanation, literature methodology, functional analysis, and case-study. The first step in this thesis is to collect and sort out the literature information about American slangs. The functional analysis and case-study will be mainly adopted in this thesis. In this thesis, some American slangs collected from "Sex and the City" will be analyzed within the framework of sociolinguistics, especially in the respect of social function. The first part of the thesis brings a brief introduction to the use of American slangs, and the definitions and the characteristics of American slangs are examined in general in the next part. In the third part, it studies the linguistic features of American slangs in "Sex and the City", such as the linguistic features of male and female; frequently-used slang expressions; classification of slang, the humor sense of American slangs and culture connotation of American slangs. Then, it analyzes the social functions of American slangs from the perspective of language functions in the fourth part. In the process of analysis, many examples are provided from the one of the famous American sitcoms "Sex and the City". And the analysis shows that American slangs plays a crucial role in American society and people’s life. In the last part, it concludes the present research with a summary of the major findings and implication for further study. American slangs study is quite necessary, which can help learners not only understand the language but also improve the comprehensive ability of English. By the analysis of American slangs and the features of American sitcoms language, this study will be useful and helpful for both English learners and English teachers. Besides, it can help to avoid pragmatic failure in cross-culture communication and improve learners’ language competence with studying American slangs.