Introduction
the time of globalization, the knowledge of foreign languages ??becomes an important and essential part of communication. In addition, an educated person of nowaday s life is expected to know not only full words of a particular language but also abbreviations of them as well. One of the most frequent methods of formation of abbreviations in the English langauge is formation of acronyms. All began during The World War II, when a necessity to replace hard and long words by simpler ones appeared. Moreover, the most frequent usage of acronyms took place in the area of ??business communication. Nowadays everybody can say that time is money, which is one of the reasons why acronyms play such an important role in business world. The usage of acronyms prevents saving time in speaking and writing. If the listener and the reader have good knowledge of acronyms, he/she can easily understand what the writer or the speaker wanted to say. Furthermore, in any business document we can find acronyms. The question arises if there is vast productivity of acronym formation in business English. This is the issue which the current research paper is mainly concerned with. Thus, the aim of the paper is to assess the level of productivity of acronym formation in business English.
The aim of the paper is specified by the following objectives:
) To provide the theoretical foundation of the concept of" acronym" and its origin
) To establish the main reasons of using acronyms in Business English
) To determine the frequency of acronyms in Business language in different registers in British National Corpus
The theoretical part of the research paper presents the theoretical background of acronyms in business English. In addition, the comparison of abbreviations, initialisms and acronyms, differentiation of them is provided as well. The practical part makes an attempt to establish the level of productivity of acronym formation by analyzing the collected library and British National Corpus based data. The conclusions present the concept of acronym raquo ;, its origin, main reasons of using acronyms in Business English and the frequency of acronyms in Business language in different registers in British National Corpus.
1. Concept of acronym
term acronym (1940) originally came from Greek" acros (point, tip)" andonuma (name). It is also called protogram which came from Greek protos (first) and gramma (letter) ie an abbreviation formed from the first letters of a series of words and pronounced as one word NATO from North Atlantic Treaty Organisation , pronounced Nay-toe; radar from radio detection and ranging , pronounced ray-dar (McArthur 1996: 13; Aronoff amp; Fudeman 2005: 114). Some scientists (Aronoff amp; Fudeman 2005; The Oxford Dictionary of Abbreviations 1998) declare that abbreviations pronounced as one word such as NATO is an initialism because of not being pronounced as series of letters , though.
It is not exactly known why acronyms were started to be used as one of the ways of derivation. Mirabela amp; Ariana (2012: 9) say that: " In the English language, the widespread use of acronyms and initialisms is a relatively new linguistic phenomenon. As literacy rose, and as advances in science and technology brought with them more complicated terms and concepts, the practice of abbreviating terms became increasingly convenient. In business, industry, education, and government, acronyms and initialisms are often used by people working within the same fields. However, such abbreviations may not be comprehensible to those outside the field. Certain abbreviations can mean different things to different people. lt; ... gt; The rapid advance of science and technology in recent centuries seems to be an underlying force driving the usage, as new inventions and concepts with multiword names create a demand for shorter, more manageable names" . As it is seen from the date, the most important cause of appearance of acronym was The Second World War when tanks, telephones, various organizations and many other things were created. It was almost impossible to form a short sentence using such long phrases.
2. Types of derivation
are many ways of derivation in English morphological system. All scientists declare that general and most frequently used method of derivation is affixation. In addition, affixation is divided into three subcategories: prefixati...
