Abbreviations in English Military Terminology

Abstract

This article presents an overview of classification and taxonomic arrangement of abbreviations in English military terminology and analyzed from two perspectives -orthographic and morphological. Previous works in this field provide sometimes conflicting categorizations, thus showing a need for a more consistent approach and classification. The work aims to provide an outline of what a typical military abbreviation consists of and how it is created. The properties of abbreviations are analyzed in terms of their length, the length of their source phrases, source phrase elements used and omitted in the creation of abbreviations, and the elements used in their creation, i.e. initials and splinters. The abbreviations are grouped according to several criteria.

Corpus-based typology analysis of abbreviations in the European Commission's Mobility related documents

“…= 2, max = 5). These results are very much in line with the results in Malenica and Fabijanić (2013) in which a mean length of 4.49 graphemes was noted for acronyms and a mean length of 3.15 graphemes for alphabetisms. To test whether this difference in length between the two types of abbreviations is statistically significant, a binary logistic regression model was created with length of abbreviation as the predictor (independent) variable and the phonological realization (acronym or alphabetism) as a criterion (dependent) variable 5 , as seen in Figure 1.…”

“…The data collected in this paper are consistent with the data collected in previous research (cf. Malenica and Fabijanić 2013;Malenica 2019), but the reason why the cut-off point between the "more" and "less" economical forms is 3 syllables is not clear at this stage. A higher proportion of omitted source phrase elements among acronyms (Table 1) and among longer abbreviations -(Figure 2) indicates that this strategy is often followed by certain trade-offs in terms of deviations from the "prototypical" mode of creation of abbreviations.…”

“…( 2 The first hypothesis we wanted to investigate was whether and to what extent the length of abbreviation affects its realization as acronym (pronounced as a single word) or as an alphabetism (pronounced letter-by-letter). Specifically, we hypothesized, following the data in Malenica and Fabijanić (2013), that the longer abbreviations are more likely to be realized as acronyms than as alphabetisms due to a linguistic economy principle (elaborated in Malenica 2019), with a cut-off point between the two types at around 3 or 4 graphemes.…”

“…3 To retrieve the abbreviations, we used the query in (1), which provides a list of all tokens written in uppercase letters. For practical purposes, we limited the query to 10 uppercase letters, because previous research (Fabijanić and Malenica 2013;Malenica and Fabijanić 2013) shows that these kinds of abbreviations are highly unlikely to occur. The CQL query in (1) also ignores the abbreviations written in lowercase letters (e.g.…”

“…The typology of abbreviations is based on previous works in this field (Fabijanić 2014;Fabijanić 2015a and2015b;Malenica and Fabijanić 2013;Fabijanić and Malenica 2013), which provided a more consistent and more transparent approach to the classification of abbreviations, based on different other works and approaches (Fandrych 2008a;Fandrych 2008b;Fandrych 2007;Gjuran-Coha and Bosnar-Valković 2008;Bieswanger 2007;Lehrer 2007;Harley 2006;López Rúa 2006;López Rúa 2004;Jackson and Ze Amvela 2005;Crystal 2004;Plag 2003;Stockwell and Minkova 2001;Crystal 1995;Algeo 1991;Cannon 1989). Abbreviations are classified according to two criteria: narrower and broader sense, and their differences in orthographic formation are described by the set of specific descriptors.…”