A Corpus-based Study Of English Military Abbreviations

Abbreviations, being concise and comprehensive, have long been widely employed in various areas. The linguistic value of abbreviations has drawn much attention from many language researchers. Compared with the prosperous and fruitful studies of English abbreviations used in many non-military fields, the studies of English military abbreviations are rather scattered and far from being comprehensive or systematic, and most of the studies are based on only a few examples.With the introduction of corpus linguistics, many language researchers in China have conducted a great number of researches and practiced a lot on the construction and application of corpora. They have proven that, corpora, by virtue of real world texts, great capacity and rapid search, have been widely used in various areas of language teaching and linguistic study.However, there is still no corpus-based study of English military abbreviations. Based on English-Chinese Dictionary of Military Terms, the author randomly takes some samples out and builds a corpus, aiming to conduct a comparatively systematic and comprehensive study of English military abbreviations. This thesis adopts the corpus approach and analyzes all entries collected in the self-built corpus mainly within the framework of morphology. The important findings are as follows: (1) The three conventional word-formation ways for English abbreviations, namely, acronym, blending and clipping, are also applicable to English military abbreviations. Besides, the formation of English military abbreviations is more complex and flexible because there are more subtypes and a considerable number of English military terms mainly represented by military weapons and communication specials, can also be abbreviated as codes whose abbreviated form does not correspond to the complete form at all; (2) Ten major word-formation strategies are usually adopted in English military terms abbreviation: replacement, omission, addition, inversion, numeralization, analogization, retaining the function word, combining two into one, borrowing the pronunciation, and multi-layered abbreviation; (3) Five word-formation standards are observed in English military terms abbreviation: simplicity, salience, pronounceability, confidentiality and similarity; (4) Three steps may be followed in guessing the complete form of an English military abbreviation: firstly to infer whether the complete term is in the form of single word, phrase or sentence according to context and basic grammatical rules, secondly to guess the complete form according to the word-formation rules of English military abbreviations , and finally to put every possible result back to the text.