On Zoosemic Tendencies in the Vocabulary of Prison Slang

The multifaceted prison slang may be considered to be the linguistic phenomenon which has relatively recently started to attract the attention of various representatives of the linguistic world, such as, for example, semanticists, sociolinguists and those who engage in the development of linguistic anthropology. In the past, prison slang was mainly perceived as a part of the prison subculture, and hence it was discussed as a socio-cultural problem, with little or no emphasis being put on its strictly linguistic features. Not to mention the issue of animal metaphors in prison slang forming a part and parcel of its vocabulary. On the basis of the research carried out by Ciechanowska (2017), related to the problem of zoosemy in prison slang, with special attention being given to animal nouns which either function or—at least—functioned as thief synonyms, as well as a group of animal verbs, it was possible to draw some conclusions of both qualitative and quantitative character, regarding the tendencies observable in the mechanism of animal metaphorisation. The apparatus applied in the analysis of the group of selected animal nouns and verbs was based on the theoretical and methodological frameworks of the cognitive approach, probably the most productive framework in lexical semantics, combined with some elements of componential analysis.