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Terminology
Vol. 27:2 (2021) ► pp.219–253

Identification and characterization of nested-abbreviated terms in scientific discourse

| Universidad de Antioquia
ORCID logo | Universidad de Antioquia
| Universidad de Antioquia

This paper analyzes nested-abbreviated terms from a linguistic perspective by describing their morphological, syntactic, and semantic features for terminology purposes. Nested-abbreviated terms can be considered as abbreviated forms, either initialisms or acronyms, which have within their meaning another abbreviated term. To carry out the analysis, 433 nested-abbreviated terms were extracted from two specialized dictionaries in English. Data analysis showed that, from the morphological and semantic perspective, nested-abbreviated terms behave like typical abbreviations. Important differences were found from a syntactic standpoint where nested abbreviated terms behave as premodifiers in the noun phrase (NP) in 98.93% of the cases. As this is the first time nested-abbreviated terms are studied, they were not only described but also analyzed and defined. Although the percentage of nested-abbreviated terms obtained from the dictionaries is relatively low, less than 1% of total abbreviations, it was found that it is highly relevant to study this growing phenomenon in specialized languages for terminology extraction, as well as for other purposes.

Keywords: nested-abbreviated terms, initialisms, acronyms, minor-word formation, scientific discourse
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework
    • A first definition of nesting
  • 3.Methodology
    • Description and collection of corpus
  • 4.Results and analysis
    • Linguistic analysis
    • Morphological aspects of nested-abbreviated terms
      • Formation
      • Type
      • Length
      • Spelling
      • Number
    • Syntactic aspects of nested-abbreviated terms
      • Lexical category
      • Abbreviation position
      • Morphosyntactic patterns
      • Syntactic relations
    • Semantic aspects of nested-abbreviated terms
      • Semantic type
    • Nesting
    • Types of nesting
      • Simple nesting
      • Complex nesting
      • Complex horizontal nesting
      • Complex vertical nesting
      • Double complex nesting
      • Atypical nesting
      • Hybrid nesting
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 27 August 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/term.20022.riv
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