Features of the substandard vocabulary in the professional communication of aviation specialists (based on the English language)

Background. The relevance of this study is understood by the need to identify and describe the processes that alter the status of substandard language units in professional communication of aviation specialists. Purpose. To identify and characterize functions of substandard lexical units used by English aviation professionals. Materials and methods. A targeted selection process resulted in a corpus of 188 English substandard lexical units. Multiple methods were applied, including classification, functional, and lexicographical analysis to categorize these units, determine their functions and trace their migration across different lexical strata. Results. The findings indicate that the substandard vocabulary of the aviation sublanguage is fundamentally comprised of professionalisms, which are less impressive than jargonisms. The substandard vocabulary has several key functions: nominative and the novelty function, both inherent to each substandard lexical unit, as well as compressive function, manifested in contractions, and emotive one, expressed through metaphors. The study also revealed two countervailing processes: the determinologization, which gives rise to professionalisms, and the terminologization of substandard vocabulary.