Abbreviations in social media communication
Accounting for neology and lexicographic treatment
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/lexi.26351Keywords:
abbreviations, neologisms, social media communication, slang, lexicographic treatmentAbstract
Abbreviations form a large part of current social media communication, where messages are conditioned by time and space, allowing for fast communication in a limited space. Many abbreviations do not have an impact on language data, since they are just an alternative form of their corresponding non-abbreviated expression. However, they are a productive source of neologisms. This article presents an analysis of the trendy abbreviations used in social media by Portuguese youth and the associated neology phenomena. The lexicographic treatment of these abbreviations in the context of planning a dictionary designed to help people cope with these new trends is discussed, with a particular emphasis on neologisms. In considering the target audience and the main focus of users’ needs and profiles in modern lexicography, the decisions presented cover general options for data selection, and for the definition and design of the microstructure and macrostructure of the dictionary.
References
Arslan, M. F., and Shakir, A. (2019). Inclusion of social media abbreviations in communicative language testing. Linguistic Forum, 1(2), 42–53.
Bauer, L. (2019). Compounds and multi-word expressions in English. In B. Schlu?cker (Ed.), Complex lexical units: Compounds and multi-word expressions (pp. 45–68). Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110632446-002
Biber, D. (1993). Representativeness in corpus design. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 8(4), 243–257. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/8.4.243
Bozdechova, I., and Klegr, A. (2021). Pseudo-Anglicisms in Czech. Between borrowing and neology. In R. M. Solano and P. R. San Segundo (Eds.), Anglicisms and corpus linguistics: Corpus-aided research into the influence of English on European languages (pp. 137–150). Berlin: Peter Lang.
Cruse, D. A. (1985). Lexical semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eble, C. (1996). Slang and sociability: In-group language among college students. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press.
Ertekin, S., and Pryor, S. (2022). An exploratory study of acronyms used in social media comments. In A. B. Ersoy (Ed.), Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Marketing Educators (pp. 82–87). March 2–5. New Orleans: ACME.
Harding, L. (2014). Communicative language testing: Current issues and future research. Language Assessment Quarterly, 11(2), 186–197. https://doi.org/10.1080/15434303.2014.895829
Lew, R. (2015). Dictionaries and their users. In P. Hanks and G.-M. de Schryver (Eds.), International handbook of modern lexis and lexicography (pp. 2–4). Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45369-4_11-2
L’Homme, M.-C., and Cormier, M. C. (2014). Dictionaries and the digital revolution: A focus on users and lexical databases. International Journal of Lexicography, 27(4), 331–340. https://doi.org/10.1093/ijl/ecu023
Lino, T. (2019). Neologia e neonímia em língua portuguesa: Critérios de identificação [Neology and neonymy in Portuguese language: Identification criteria]. Linha D’Água, 32(3), 9–23. https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2236-4242.v32i3p9-23
Mechura, M. (2017). Introducing Lexonomy: An open-source dictionary writing and publishing system. In I. Kosem, C. Tiberius, M. Jakubícek, J. Kallas, S. Krek, and V. Baisa (Eds.), Electronic lexicography in the 21st century: Proceedings of eLex 2017 Conference (pp. 662–679). Leiden: Lexical Computing.
Palmer, F. R. (1986). Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Persson, G. (1990). Meanings, models and metaphors: A study in lexical semantics in English. Stockholm: Acta Universitatis Umensis.
Rambousek, A., Jakubícek, M., and Kosem, I. (2021). New developments in Lexonomy. In I. Kosem, M. Cukr, M. Jakubícek, J. Kallas, S. Krek, and C. Tiberius (Eds.), Electronic lexicography in the 21st century: Proceedings of eLex 2021 Conference (pp. 455–462). Brno: Lexical Computing.
Roth-Gordon, J. (2021). Language and creativity: Slang. In J. Stanlaw (Ed.), The international encyclopedia of linguistic anthropology (pp. 1–8). Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, Inc. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118786093.iela0192
