Teaching grammar in senior grades

Formally, some abbreviations may come to resemble blends by combining larger sets of initial and non-initial letters. However, such forms still differ crucially from proper blends in that they do neither obey the three pertinent prosodic constraints, nor do they necessarily conform to the semantic property of blends described above.  

The spelling and pronunciation of abbreviations may seem trivial, but nevertheless offers interesting perspectives on the formal properties of these words. Consider the following abbreviations with regard to their spelling and pronunciation differences:

ASAP- as soon as possible

CARE-Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere

CIA-Central Intelligence Agency

e.g.-for example

etc- et cetera

FBI-Federal Bureau of Investigation

NATO-North Atlantic Treaty Organization

VAT-value added tax

radar-radio detecting and ranging

START-Strategic Arms Reduction Talks

USA-United States of America

The orthographic and phonetic properties of the abbreviations are indicated in the following table. For some abbreviations there is more than one possibility:

 

abbreviation    spelling     pronunciation

ASAP   in capitals     as individual letters

CIA             in capitals     as individual letters

FBI    in capitals     as individual letters

VAT    in capitals     as individual letters

Care    in capitals     as a regular word

NATO   in capitals     as a regular word

START   in capitals     as a regular word

asap    in lower case letters with dots  as individual letters

e.g.    in lower case letters with dots  as individual letters

etc.             in lower case letters with dots  as individual letters

a.s.a.p.   in lower case letters with dots  the abbreviated words are

pronounced

e.g.             in lower case letters with dots  the abbreviated words are

pronounced

etc.    in lower case letters with dots  the abbreviated words are

pronounced

 

Disregarding the cases where the abbreviation can trigger the regular pronunciation of the abbreviated words(a.s.a.p., e.g., etc.) and ignoring the use or non-use of dots, abbreviations can be grouped according to two orthographic and phonological properties. They can be  either spelled in capital or in lower case letters, and they can be either pronounced by naming each individual letters (so-called initialisms, as in USA or by applying regular reading rules, as in NATO ). In the latter case the abbreviation is called acronym. The following table systematizes this observation:

spelling    pronunciation       example

in capitals    as initialism        CIA-Central

in capitals    as acronym        NATO-North

in lower case letters  as initialism        e.g.

in lower case letters  as acronym        radar-radio

The spelling of acronyms may differ with regard to use of capital letters. Usually capital letters are used, which can be interpreted as a formal device that clearly links the acronyms to its base word. Some words that historically originated as acronyms are nowadays no longer spelt with capital letters, and for the majority of speakers these forms are no longer related to the words they originally abbreviated(e.g. radar)

Acronyms,being pronounced like regular words, must conform to the phonological patterns of English, which can create problems in applying regular reading rules if the reading out would result in illegal phonological words. For example, an abbreviation like BBC is an unlikely candidate for  an acronym, because [bbk] or [bbs] are feature illegal word-internal combination of sounds in English. Sometimes, however, speakers make abbreviations pronounceable, i.e. create acronyms. This seems to be especially popular in the naming of linguistics conference:

NWAVE- New Way of Analyzing Variation in English

SLRF- Second Language Research Forum

Sometimes abbreviations are formed in such a way to yield not only pronouncable words (i.e. acronyms), but also words that are homophonous to existing words. This is often done for marketing or publicity reasons, especially in those cases where homonymous word carries a meaning that is intended to be associated with the referent of the acronym. Consider the following examples:

CARE- Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere

START- Strategic Arms Reduction Talks

The word START in particular is interesting because it was coined not only as a word to refer to an envisioned disarmament treaty between the U.S. And Soviet Union, but it was presumably also coined to evoke the idea that the American side had the intention to make a new, serious effort in disarmament talks with the Soviet Union at a time when many people doubted the willingness of the U.S. Government to seriously want disarmament. Incidentally, the START program replaced an earlier, unsuccessful disarmament effort named SALT(Strategic Arms Limitation Talks). Such data show that in political discourse, the participants consider it important how to  name a phenomenon in a particular way in order to win a political argument. The assumption underlying such a strategy is that the name used for a given phenomenon will influence the language user's concept of and attitude towards that phenomenon.[11]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

II. THE APPEARANCE OF NEW ABBREVIATION

 

Reading modern computer publications, both foreign and domestic, unwittingly encounters a lot of cuts, appropriate technologies, standards and protocols. Their number is increasing day by day, and all the new reductions fall into this category are often used and therefore do not require descriptions. Here are some examples of new abbreviation:

BIY

Purchasing the materials required for a repair or renovation that one has hired a tradesperson or other professional to perform. (From the phrase buy-it-yourself.)

DWY

Driving while yakking — driving a car while talking on a cell phone.

VBIED

A car or other vehicle rigged to act as a bomb. (From vehicle-borne improvised explosive device.)

AOS

(All options stink.) a situation in which there is no optimum or ideal course of action.

SPIN

Relating to the dense cultivation of vegetables and other crops on small plots, particularly in urban settings. (From the phrase Small Plot Intensive).

RINO

A member of the Republican party who is viewed as being too liberal. Also: rino. a Republican in name only

BOF

(birds of a feather meeting)A meeting held at a computer-related trade show or conference in which people who work in the same technology area at different companies exchange information and experiences. (Often abbreviated as "BOF meeting.")

BAM

A bricks-and-mortar company

LULU

A real estate development or other construction project to which the local residents are opposed. Acronym based on the phrase "locally unwanted land use."

PGST

(Permanent global summertime), the ability to purchase at the wholesale level certain fruits and vegetables from different parts of the world at different times of the year, thus enabling retailers to offer this produce either year round or for longer periods than their traditional local growing seasons.

DUPPIE.

A depressed urban professional; a person who once had a high-status or high-paying job and must now work in a menial or lower paying job

TEOTWAWKI

The End Of The World As We Know It; a catch-all phrase for the chaos and disruption that some people expect will occur in the new millennium.

plur

Peace, love, unity and respect. The unofficial credo of the rave scene.

SMUM

A woman who finds motherhood and her children tedious and uninteresting. (Acronym from Smart, Middle-Class, Uninvolved, Mother.)

CXO

Generic term for a corporate officer, such as a CEO (chief executive officer) or CFO (chief financial officer). Also: CxO.

SITCOM

Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage. The natural evolution of upwardly-mobile couples who have children and then one spouse stops working to raise the kids.

YIMBY

A person who favors a project that would add a dangerous or unpleasant feature to his or her neighborhood. (Acronym from the phrase yes in my back yard.)Derivatives:

-YIMBYist.n.

-YIMBYism n.

HENRY

A person with a substantial income, but who is not yet wealthy. (From the phrase High Earner, Not Rich Yet.)

mung

Mash until no good; to change something so that it no longer works properly.

NEET

A young person who isn't working, in school, or in a training program. (From the phrase Not in employment, education, or training.)

CHAOS

Can't have anyone over syndrome; not inviting guests to one's house because it is too messy or cluttered.

MTBU

Maximum time to belly-up; the maximum number of days, weeks, or months that a company is expected to survive.

GOOMBY

A person who hopes for or seeks the removal of some dangerous or unpleasant feature from his or her neighborhood. —GOOMBYism (GOOM.bee.iz.um) noun. The attitude of such a person. Get Out of My Backyard

VUCA

Volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous

BRICs

The countries of Brazil, Russia, India, and China viewed as a group of emerging economies with large potential markets. —adj.

MVVD

A person who consumes an excessive amount of alcohol while standing up.

—adj. male volume vertical drinker

BANANA

Build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone. A person who is opposed to new real estate development, particularly projects close to their neighbourhood. —adj.

JOOTT

An unexplained problem that resolves itself over time. (From the phrase just one of those things.)

NOTE

Not over there, either. A person or attitude that opposes new real estate development in the local community and is not open to compromise on this issue.

NEV

A neighborhood electric vehicle; a small electric car designed to travel at low speeds over short distances.

BHAG

An ambitious or difficult plan or goal. big, hairy, audacious goal.

kipper

An adult son or daughter, particularly one aged 30 or more, who still lives with his or her parents. —adj. From kids in parents' pockets eroding retirement savings.

33.DWB

abbr. Driving while black — when a car is pulled over by a police officer for no other reason than the driver is black.

9/11

(nyn uh.lev.un)n. September 11, 2001, the date of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. —adj. Also:9-11.

CAVEs

A group of people who routinely oppose new real estate developments and other projects that they believe will harm their local area. Acronym based on the phrase citizens against virtually everything. Also: CAVE people or CAVE dwellers.

KGOY

The perceived notion that children of all ages are performing activites, particularly playing with toys, traditionally seen as being suitable for older children. (From Kids Getting Older Younger.)

NOPE

A person or attitude that opposes all real estate development or other projects that would harm the environment or reduce property values.

(Not on Planet Earth)

wombat

Something that is profoundly uninteresting and/or useless.

This sense of the word comes from the acronym WOMBAT: Waste Of Money Brains And Time.

P2P

(pee.too.pee)1.Peer-to-peer adj. Describes a network or other technology that enables users to trade files directly without requiring a central database or server.2.Person-to-person adj. Describes a payment service that enables one individual to pay another for an online transaction (such as an auction sale). 3.Path to profitability n. The strategy a company plans to implement to become profitable.

SWEDOW.

Unnecessary or inappropriate items donated to a charity organization or relief effort. (From the phrase Stuff WE DOn't Want.)

SARS

An acronym formed from the initial letters of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, the name of an infectious disease, caused by a coronavirus, that affects the respiratory system and can in some cases be fatal.

WAP

An acronym based on the initial letters of Wireless Application Protocol, a specification supporting the transfer of data(especially for Internet access, including text and images) to and from a hand-held wireless device, especially a mobile phone with suitable display panel.

C2C

Consumer-to-consumer; describes transactions in which a consumer sells a service or product directly to another consumer.[12]

Very interesting history of origin ofcertain abbreviations.Here are some examples:

£ for lb(pound)

The abbreviation originates with the Latin phrase libra pondo, which means “a unit of measurement by weight.”  The Romans shortened the phrase to pondo, which ultimately became pound in English, but the abbreviation of the first word – lb., for libra- endured. The symbol for British currency is a stylized L, or £, which comes from the same source. The value of the British pound was originally equal to one pound of silver.

Xmas

Many Christians believe that the abbreviation is intended to "take the Christ out Christmas" or because of the letter's similarity to a cross. Be that as it may, the real origin of 'Xmas' lies within the Greek language. The Greek word for 'Christ' begins with the Greek letter 'chi,' which is represented by a symbol similar to the letter 'X' in the modern Roman alphabet. Therefore, 'Xmas' is a completely allowable abbreviation that is almost as old as the Christian religion itself! Similarly a Christian could be referred to as an "Xian".

V.I.P.(Very important person)

This frequently used contraction was created during World War II by a British officer in charge of organizing flights for important military leaders. In order to conceal the names from enemy spies, each of these were referred to as a “V.I.P.” in the flight plan.

Mrs(A married woman)

Originally, Mrs. was a shortened version of mistress, a word that used to mean “wife” but has since acquired a very different meaning. Strictly speaking, because the word it once abbreviated has changed its meaning, Mrs. is no longer an abbreviation –  unlike Mr., its male counterpart, which can be spelled out as Mister.

K(A strikeout in baseball)

In the 1860s when a batter struck out, it was proper to say that he “struck.” It was during this era that a newspaperman named Henry Chadwick created symbols for use with his new invention – the box score. He gave each play a letter: S for sacrifice, E for error, and so on. Since S was already taken, he used to last letter of “struck” instead of the first to abbreviate it: K.

Rx(A drug prescription)

Actually, there is no x in Rx. In Medieval Latin, the first word in medicinal prescription directing one to take a specific quantity of a concoction was recipe, meaning “take” or “receive.”  This was later symbolized as an R with a slash across its leg. The spelling Rx is an attempt to represent this symbol in English letters.

P. D. Q.(Pretty damn quick.)

This abbreviation for 'pretty damn quick' or 'pretty damned quick' is now so commonplace that it is often written without the full stops, i.e. 'PDQ'. Many abbreviations have origins that are difficult to trace. With PDQ life is a little easier. The term was first used in The Mighty Dollar, a play by Benjamin E. Woolf, first performed in 1875 at New York's Park Theatre. The play's money-hungry character Judge Bardwell Stote habitually used abbreviations like T.T.T - a 'tip-top time' and G.I.C. - 'goose is cooked'.         "That's right, you'd better step P.D.Q., pretty damn quick."               'Pretty damned quick' was already in use by 1875, for example, this piece from the Memoirs of Charles Mathews, Comedian, 1839:                  "If he showed me any of it, I'd make him clear out pretty damned quick."

Why P.D.Q. lasted and the numerous other abbreviations from Woolf's work didn't is open to debate.

B.O.(Body odor)                                                                                                  In 1933 the Lifebuoy Health Soap Company ran a series of radio advertisements containing their new slogan: “Lifebuoy stops B— O—.”  A heavy two-note foghorn warning was synchronized with the “B.O.,”  giving the phrase a negative spin it has retained ever since.

D-Day(June 6, 1944, the day Allied forces invaded France during WWII)

The D in D-Day does not stand for “designated”  or “defeat,” as many believe, but simply for “day.”  D-day actually means “day day.” The redundancy comes from the common practice in army correspondence of referring to a top secret time as H-hour or D-day.

XXX

(Marking on bottles in cartoons to indicate that they contain alcohol) During the 19th century, breweries in Britain marked their bottles X, XX, or XXX as a sign of alcohol content. The number of Xs corresponded to the potency of the drink.

OK

"OK" is an English expression, pronounced identically, and it appears in almost all the areas and in all the languages of the world, although it is difficult to say that it is actually a word or how it is originated.

Whether you are in China, India, Great Britain or Italy, it is enough to say "OK" and the meaning of affirmative expressions will be clear to everyone.Until recently, both in English-speaking countries and the rest of the world, the famous acronym today can hear from the mouth of the Heads of State and Government, and also in the pages of literary history, awarded with the Nobel Prize.

Incredible destiny for the word that have emerged from the wrong "spelling". In fact, the acronym first appeared in an article published back in 1839. in the list of the Boston Morning Post in which he referred to the person who says "OK", short for "all correct". Mistake was not at all unusual for that time when there were few people that knew how to read and write.

However, there are other theories about the origin of the acronym "OK" and they do not all come from America. Specifically, the language of Aristotle, "Ola Kala" means "all is well", and even the Greeks had used to shorten the term of "OK". In Germany, "Ohne Korrektur", translated "without corrections", also shortened the same way. Swedes, however, use the term "Oc aye" (oh yes), which is pronounced just like "okay", and is not necessary to abbreviate it.

The British public broadcaster BBC has recently devoted an entire appendix famous acronym. "This is a very unusual word that sounds like an abbreviation, an acronym. But it would make its strange appearance could be the reason for her huge popularity, ".                                                                                                     2.2 Transformations of word-groups into words involve different types of lexical shortening: ellipsis or substantivisation, initial letter or syllable abbreviations (also referred to as acronyms), blendings, etc.    Substantivisation consists in dropping of the final nominal member of a frequently used attributive word-group. When such a member of the word-group is dropped as, for example, was the case with a documentary film the remaining adjective takes on the meaning and all the syntactic functions of the noun and thus develops into a new word changing its class membership and becoming homonymous to the existing adjective. It may be illustrated by a number of nouns that appeared in this way, e.g. an incendiary goes back to an incendiary bomb, the finals to the final examinations, an editorial to an editorial article, etc. Other more recent creations are an orbital (Br. ‘a highway going around the suburbs of a city’), a verbal (‘a verbal confession introduced as evidence at a trial’), a topless which goes to three different word-groups and accordingly has three meanings: 1) a topless dress, bathing suit, etc., 2) a waitress, dancer, etc. wearing topless garments, 3) a bar, night-club featuring topless waitresses or performers.   Substantivisation is often accompanied by productive suffixation as in, e.g., a one-winger from one-wing plane, a two-decker from two-deck bus or ship; it may be accompanied by clipping and productive suffixation, e.g. flickers (coll.) from flicking pictures, a smoker from smoking carriage, etc.   Вlendings are the result of conscious creation of words by merging irregular fragments of several words which are aptly called “splinters.” 1 Splinters assume different shapes — they may be severed from the source word at a morpheme boundary as in transceiver (=transmitter and receiver), transistor (= transfer and resistor) or at a syllable boundary like cute (from execute) in electrocute, medicare (from medical care), polutician (from pollute and politician) or boundaries of both kinds may be disregarded as in brunch (from breakfast and lunch), smog (from smoke and fog), ballute (from baloon and parachute), etc. Many blends show some degree of overlapping of vowels, consonants and syllables or echo the word or word fragment it replaces. This device is often used to attain punning effect, as in foolosopher echoing philosopher; icecapade (= spectacular shows on ice) echoing escapade; baloonatic (= baloon and lunatic).  Blends are coined not infrequently in scientific and technical language as a means of naming new things, as trade names in advertisements. Since blends break the rules of morphology they result in original combinations which catch quickly. Most of the blends have a colloquial flavour. 

         2. Clipping refers to the creation of new words by shortening a word of two or more syllables (usually nouns and adjectives) without changing its class membership. Clipped words, though they often exist together with the longer original source word function as independent lexical units with a certain phonetic shape and lexical meaning of their own. The lexical meanings of the clipped word and its source do not as a rule coincide, for instance, doc refers only to ‘one who practices medicine’, whereas doctor denotes also ‘the higher degree given by a university and a person who has received it’, e.g. Doctor of Law, Doctor of Philosophy. Clipped words always differ from the non-clipped words in the emotive charge and stylistic reference. Clippings indicate an attitude of familiarity on the part of the user either towards the object denoted or towards the audience, thus clipped words are characteristic of colloquial speech. In the course of time, though, many clipped words find their way into the literary language losing some of their colloquial colouring. Clippings show various degrees of semantic dissociation from their full forms. Some are no longer felt to be clippings, e.g. pants (cf. pantaloons), bus (cf. omnibus), bike (cf. bicycle), etc. Some of them retain rather close semantic ties with the original word. This gives ground to doubt whether the clipped words should be considered separate words. Some linguists hold the view that in case semantic dissociation is slight and the major difference lies in the emotive charge and stylistic application the two units should be regarded as word-variants (e.g. exam and examination, lab and laboratory, etc.).   Clipping often accompanies other ways of shortening such as substantivisation, e.g. perm (from permanent wave), op (from optical art), pop (from popular music, art, singer, etc.), etc.        As independent vocabulary units clippings serve as derivational bases for suffixal derivations collocating with highly productive neutral and stylistically non-neutral suffixes -ie, -er, e.g. nightie (cf. nightdress), panties, hanky (cf. handkerchief). Cases of conversion are not infrequent, e.g. to taxi, to perm, etc. There do not seem to be any clear rules by means of which we might predict where a word will be cut though there are several types into which clippings are traditionally classified according to the part of the word that is clipped:

1)Words that have been shortened at the end—the so-called apocope, e.g. ad (from advertisement), lab (from laboratory), mike (from microphone), etc.         Words that have been shortened at the beginning—the so-called aphaeresis, e.g. car (from motor-car), phone (from telephone), copter (from helicopter), etc        2)Words in which some syllables or sounds have been omitted from the middle—the so-called syncope, e.g. maths (from mathematics), pants (from pantaloons), specs (from spectacles), etc.                       3)Words that have been clipped both at the beginning and at the end, e.g. flu (from influenza), tec (from detective), fridge (from refrigerator), etc.    It must be stressed that acronyms and clipping are the main ways of word-creation most active in present-day English. The peculiarity of both types of words is that they are structurally simple, semantically non-motivated and give rise to new root-morphemes.[4]   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CONCLUSION

 

An abbreviation is a shortened form of a word or phrase. Usually, but not always, it consists of a letter or group of letters taken from the word or phrase. The abbreviation is one of the main trends in development of Modern English, especially in its colloquial layer, which, in its turn at high degree is supported by development of modern informational technologies and simplification of alive speech.

Total review of the subject discussed 

Having analyzed the problem of shortening of words in Modern English we could do the following conclusions:         a) The problem of shortened words in Modern English is very actual nowadays.             b) There are several kinds of shortening: shortening proper, blending, abbreviations.            c) A number of famous linguists dealt with the problem of shortening of words in Modern English. In particular, Profs. Ullmann and Broal emphasized the social reasons for shortening, L. Lipka pointed out non-binary contrast or many-member lexical sets and gave the type which he called directional opposition, V.N. Comissarov and Walter Skeat proved the link of homonymy influence with the appearing of shortened words, etc.         d) The problem of shortening is still waits for its detail investigation.