EXPRESSIVENESS OF TERMINOLOGICAL ABBREVIATIONS IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH-LANGUAGE DISCOURSE OF ENERGY INDUSTRY

Abstract

The rapid development of science and technology and an increase in the information exchange have led to the trend towards the shortening of multi-component terms, and this is currently one of the most productive word- building patterns of English language vocabulary. The practicality of using abbreviated terms contributes to the processes of language economy, fosters the tendency of the English language to monosyllabism, and ensures the communicative and pragmatic integrity of various types of discourse. In the English-language energy industry discourse, both abbreviations and acronyms have been identified, which are distinguished depending on the principle of their design: abbreviations are usually formed from the first letters of a term combination and each letter is read separately, while acronyms are built from various combinations of the elements of a term combination, but are read as a full word. An acronym that is pronounced the same way as a common word is called “omoacronym” and it usually receives an additional connotative meaning, which is specified by the speaker’s pragmatic intention. The intentions for creating omoacronyms are found to make a new term easier to remember and more common to use, due to associations with the internal form of a familiar word. As for semantics, terminological abbreviations in contemporary English-language energy industry discourse can be divided into three categories: names of energy companies, names of official documents, and names of projects, newly invented devices, methods, etc. It is the third category that includes most of the homoacronyms that have been revealed to perform the pragmatic function of attracting the addressee’s attention by creating a positive impression of the proposed new idea or initiative in the energy industry because of the word pun involved. In general, the presence of homonymy of terminological abbreviations is quite noticeable. Accordingly, to overcome the difficulties of understanding and translating cross- industry and intra-industry homonymous abbreviations, definitional and contextual analysis should be used based on modern dictionaries, specialized reference sources, and corpus-based techniques. The distinction between inter- industry homonyms is made obvious across the broad contexts and by determining the type of discourse to which the communication of specialists belongs, while intra-industry homonymy requires further details about the subject matter of communication, and it is usually the immediate context and collocations that will eventually help clearly understand the semantics of the abbreviation.