ПРОБЛЕМЫ ТЕРМИНОЛОГИИ В ОБЛАСТИ ИЗУЧЕНИЯ СНИЖЕННОЙ ЛЕКСИКИ

This article deals with the basic terms used to describe substandard lexis: vernacular, jargon, argot and slang. These terms are investigated into from the three linguistic traditions: Russian, English and French. Thus this article tries to explore the moments of overlapping in the usage of these terms as well as differences in their usage. This article looks at the origin of these terms in different languages and using this knowledge compares the way how they are used nowadays with their original meanings in the language of origin. This helps to demonstrate the discrepancies of terminology as it shows the problems of using the terms when describing one and the same phenomenon in different languages. Special attention is paid to the term slang in English and Russian and its possible equivalents in French as the French language does not possess such a term. Some relatively new ideas are also looked at. Such is the idea of the term jargot (which is derived from argot and jargon ) as this term is not widely spread in Russian linguistics. Besides, this article poses a question into the usage of the term argot in Russian linguistics. French tradition talks about using this term in its plural form whereas when this term was borrowed into the Russian language, it lost its ability to form a plural form. In general, this article is not intended to give an exact answer for using terminology in different linguistic traditions but try to look at some basic ideas and points in their usage with an idea in mind of installing some connections between one and the same phenomenon and different variants of its presentation in different languages.