SYNERGETIC POTENTIAL OF ABBREVIATION IN MODERN GERMAN

Abstract

The article deals with the synergetic features of abbreviations in modern German language. It presents an overview of classification and taxonomic arrangement of abbreviations in Modern German and analyzed from two perspectives – orthographic and morphological. The properties of abbreviations are analyzed in terms of their length, the length of their source phrases and phrase elements used or omitted in the creation of abbreviations. The abbreviations are grouped according to structural and formal features and information load of individual letters.

The study aims to provide answers to the following research questions: How are letters and initials arranged in initialisms? Which patterns are frequently used and do incidental patterns of contractions occur? What is the average number of letters in abbreviations? What is the ratio of initialisms, blends, and hybrid forms of clippings and the number of constituents in source phrases? The research was conducted on a large corpus of abbreviations taken from the 5th edition of Duden’s Dictionary of Abbreviations.

The corpus comprises 6403 homonymic abbreviations, distributed into several abbreviation types. The corpus is analyzed on two levels – orthographic and morphological. Orthographic level deals with the number of elements of abbreviations and their source phrases (average number and patterns of arrangement of initials and splinters and their ratio to source phrase constituents), as well as the ways of their graphic presentation, while the morphological level considers the word classes of abbreviations and their source phrase elements, and the usage or omission of lexical and function words. The carried out analysis has shown that distribution of quantity of homonymous abbreviations depending on quantity of designated words and word combinations, and also dependence of quantity of homonyms on length of abbreviations is described by the Menzerath’s law and entered in synergetic homonymy model.