Abstract

OSCAR ELIAS, BLANCO CORREA. Urban voices in Caracas. Lexicographical index of skaters. Cuad. linguist. hisp. [online]. 2016, n.27, pp.111-136. ISSN 0121-053X.

In recent years, groups bearing the label of urban tribes have been emerging in different Latin American cities. These subcultures present distinctive features and characteristics that distinguish them from the rest of the people that constitute the city´s cultural landscape. Among those distinctive features is vocabulary, as the most adaptable component of the linguistic system, which stands out because it is used as an ideal tool for the distinction between different urban groups. Vocabulary is very useful for urban tribes because it allows them to create and/or use the same lexical units to communicate with each other and, somehow, to set and establish a distance with those unrelated to their enviroment. Starting from this situation, it is estimated that vocabulary, as well as clothing, music and another accessories, is a factor and an important semiotic element in the construction of identity reflected in this series of voices. That is why this paper has the following objectives: 1) To register the vocabulary used by the Skater urban tribe and 2) to describe the vocabulary used by that urban tribe. The theoretical grounding of this work is based on the approaches of Chumaceiro and Álvarez (2004), Colmenares (1996), Ávila (1987), Tejera (1993), among others. The corpus is taken from surveys and interviews made to key informants; constrastive ethnographic and lexicographical methods are used for the recording and description of the obtained data.

Keywords : urban tribes; vocabulary; ethnography; lexicography; semiotics; contrastivity.

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