Talking about doing: lexicon and event

Abstract

ABSTRACTSociolinguists have not much attended to participants' terminology for events. For this, the usual ethnosemantic focus on relationships of inclusion within a taxonomic structure is insufficient. Stage-process relationships and case-grammar notions of agent, object, instrument and result are used to account for the conceptual structure encoded in a set of addict's argot terms. It is suggested that the addict's argot functions as a needed, standardized terminology, not just for concealment. (Ethnosemantics, cognitive anthropology, case grammar, generative semantics, argots.)