slang

The article studies one of the main variants of the English language, Australian English. The main variants of English differ from each other on phonetic and lexical linguistic levels. The grammatical structure is the same in all variants, that is why the focus of the study was the lexical level of Australian English. The word-stock of Australian English includes slang as a certain layer of the vocabulary. It started to be formed under a strong influence of the first settlers from Great Britain.

The article deals with the concept of slang, its functioning in modern Russian, which is being examined on the material of metaphors based on the lexis of financial and economic spheres. The metaphoric models are also presented, as well as the target areas typical to the semantic fields under consideration.

The article considers the models of forming metaphorical shifts in slang on the basis of the ‘Property and Exchange Relationships’ semantic field in the modern English language (its American variant). Target areas are revealed and analyzed from the statistical and cognitive perspectives.

The article studies some word formation peculiarities of military slang, its functioning in the speech of the military, and provides derivational classification of English military slang words.