Complex analysis of professional discourse: peculiarities of functionality of argot of French police officers

This article is dedicated to the peculiarities of functionality of argot of French police officers on derivational and semantic levels. The analysis of empirical material determined the key trends of derivation of the reference group, as well as the link between the leading functions of argotic lexicon with selection of ways and sources of harvesting lexical repertoire. It was revealed that in argot of French police officers prevails derivation based on the imagery reconsideration: metaphor allows realizing ludic function of argot, while metonymy is more often used for crypto-alalic purpose. The argot of French police officers also features an active process of borrowing lexemes from other languages; American and British versions of English language serve as the main donors. In the course of research, the author determines the semantic dominants of argot of French police officers: in lexical repertoire prevail the lexemes related to various type of legal violations, which similar to other argots, due to the thematic limitation of lexicon is nonfunctional. In majority of instances, synonymic rows include lexemes with different connotation; however, in some areas, the series is comprised of lexical units allowing to designate differentiation within the concept class. Using particular examples, the article explores other types of wordplay based on polysemy and homophony. It is noted that wordplay on the basis of homophony carries spontaneous character, while other types are more complicated and require certain background knowledge.