Lexematic structures in the slang terms of headlines that reach Lima popular newspapers to Trujillo, Peru

Abstract

Throughout this investigation an operative sequence was followed that considered the following steps: a) Project development: For this purpose the formulation of an investigation of descriptive, non experimental type was set, in which a working hypothesis is disregarded, but not the variables. b) Sample selection: This was organized in May 2008 and the procedure was centered on the collection-purchase of the tabloids “Aja”, “Trome”, “El Popular” and “Ojo”, as well as access to their respective web pages. c) Data collection: Newspaper headlines whose phraseological sequence contain linguistic structures derived from the creole slang and 'replana' (jargon of delinquents), whose use is also notorious among the popular classes and in the juvenile cronolect of Trujillo. To do this, an observational technique was used and similarly the tabloid headlines, whose microstructure corresponded to the requirements considered in our investigation proposal, were put on file. d) Processing: After setting out the sample and the corpus, the underlining of the slang terms inside every tabloid headlines was initiated, pointing out also the informative items by which each micro text is registered. After individualizing the terms in question, we proceeded to count them. Immediately a lexicon was developed, that included not only the meaning of each term but also the intervening formative linguistic structure (s) at the phonetic, morpho-syntactic and semantic levels. Next, in establishing the lexicon with the intention of specifying exactly the corpus of relevant data, we gathered the information according to the respective linguistic structure in order to finally establish the dominant semantic fields of the corpus. After this exhaustive linguistic analysis as the first stage of the content analysis, we arrived at a second stage: the statistical analysis, with the purpose of giving reliability to the linguistic data collected. e) Conclusions: After the statistical data were interpreted, we arrived at a series of conclusions that attempt to answer the initial problem since we do not have an operative hypothesis. Moreover, we establish some guidelines that are outside the initial approach. The slang--from a linguistic point of view--is a broad spectrum where street talk, juvenile talk, and the eminently criminal talk are interconnected.