International Journal of English Linguistics; Vol. 10, No. 1; 2020

Keywords:
abbreviation, discourse, cognition, proposition, communication, integrated approach, 
interdiscursivity 
1. Introduction 
Abbreviation can be clearly stated as a powerful means in the development of languages. The process of 
abbreviation can be traced as far back as Ancient Egypt, when contracted linguistic forms consisting of more than 
one element emerged. As for the system of English abbreviations, it has evolved over several centuries. With the 
letter ‘þ’, standing for ‘þæt’, functioning on the first page of the Anglo-Saxon manuscript Beowulf, commences 
the long history of abbreviations in the English language. Later on, in medieval manuscripts abbreviations became 
more numerous. The number of abbreviations began to increase considerably in the nineteenth century with the 
development of telegraph (González & Cannon, 1994), as this means of communication demanded contractions to 
lower the price of the message transfer. At that time, they were recognized as independent lexical units. However, 

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International Journal of English Linguistics 
Vol. 10, No. 1; 2020 
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they were few in comparison with the avalanche of abbreviations at the turn of the Century. David Crystal writes: 
“Abbreviations, one of the most noticeable features of present-day English linguistic life, would form a major 
part of any super dictionary. Often thought to be an exclusively modern habit, the fashion for abbreviations can 
be traced back over 150 years” (Crystal, 2003, p. 120). A considerable amount of abbreviations appeared in the 
twentieth and the twenty first centuries in various types of discourse, for example, in business, public relations, 
politics, etc. 
Abbreviations break existing stereotypes of the lexical syntactic structures and create the new ones by the 
replacement of the long lexical units by their short forms that may sometimes carry even more information than 
the conventional lexical units (their prototypes), though being regarded as units of secondary nomination. From 
the terminological point of view, it should be noted that in this paper the term “abbreviations” is referred to 
various types of contracted forms, ever existed and realized at the level of natural human language, comprising 
both letters and syllables, as well as elements of other semiotic systems (e.g., figures or emoticones). The issues 
concerning various types of abbreviation (Crystal, 2003, p. 120) are taken into consideration as well. 
Widespread creation and use of abbreviations as a materialized and verbally represented lingual-mental process 
due to the emergence of saving mental power and attitude can find the explication both by the appearance of new 
phenomena and their contracted nomination requirements in terms of the tendency to reduce existing nominative 
units for practical purposes (Vishnyakova et al., 2019). This is also explained by the need for creativity and 
search for optimal solutions, inherent in human consciousness and typical of human nature. From the point of 
view of cognitive-discursive approach, the formation of these nominative units in language can be considered to 
be the phenomenon related to realization of verbalized mental processes. They are referred to particular varieties 
of discourse structuring, due to the needs of the society and certain discursive limitations (Van Dijk, 1997; Van 
Dijk & Kintch, 1983; Couthard & Montgomery, 2015). 
It should be mentioned in this connection that transformations in the abbreviations area are referred to the 
heuristic character of the phenomenon in question, determined by message optimization and efficient 
information transfer requirements within the linguistic cultural community. The heuristic nature of the process 
under investigation can be considered to be the basis for its linguistic functional peculiarities manifestation in 
discourse, while paying special attention to the abilities of the representatives of the language community to 
provide adequate interpretation in the course of abbreviations decoding. For example, the motivating factors for 
the acronyms realization in business discourse are the need to save time and language efforts, as well as the 
desire for an “on-screen” arrangement of the text and its components subject to compression. This leads to the 
emergence of new abbreviations of more general and more specific nature, that is characterizing the sphere of 
business as a whole and as the totality of individual professional areas. The need to study and properly organize 
abbreviation materials can be illustrated and confirmed by the following reasoning, accompanied by the 
description of the state of affairs in business: “First of all everyone knows that in today’s business world we are 
all confronted daily with a variety of common (and not so common) abbreviated terms. Whether these terms are 
communicated in written and verbal form, confusion can arise, since most of them frequently convey several 
different meanings. For example, IBM is a three-letter word that is quickly identified throughout the world as 
initials for International Business Machines. However, these same three letters also stand for the Institute for 
Burn Medicine, Industrias Biologicas Mexicana (Mexican Biological Industries), intercontinental ballistic 
missile, and the International Brotherhood of magicians. And the two-letter words, IB and IM, have a list of 
several dozen possible spelled-out forms” (Rosenberg, 1992, p. VII). 
It should always be borne in mind in this connection that abbreviations constitute a two-fold process, being both 
natural and artificial in its manifestation as it constitutes certain difficulties in terms of pronunciation or 
semantics identification (Nilsen, 1981). Nonetheless abbreviations proceed naturally in different varieties of 
discourse and serve successfully to substitute their prototypes both at the system of language and actual speech 
levels.