This article investigates abbreviations in different Internet discourse types and genres. For the study, continuous sampling method was used to select 76 abbreviations in hypertexts from 7 Internet English-language sites. The selected units were classified into 3 basic types with further subdivisions: letter-number (figure-for-word, figure-for-word-part, contractions as a result of vowel deletion), graphical (both Latin and English) and lexical (acronyms, initialisms, shortening and partial shortening) abbreviations based on the classification adopted in this research. Among the subdivisions, abbreviations involving figures, initialisms and contractions turned out the most frequent. Most of them were found in social networks, blogs, chats and forums. Further, abbreviations were analyzed in 6 types of Internet discourse: legal, political, personal, mass media, advertising and pedagogical. Particular genres representing the types were studied: a business email, a law firm’s website, a political blog, an Instagram personal page, a network media web page, and an academic institution’s page. It was discovered that on the whole (among 57 examples), lexical abbreviations prevail over graphical ones (56% vs 44%). On the whole, 44% were graphical abbreviations, 28% – initialisms, 23% – acronyms and 5% – shortenings. However, in each discourse, the distribution demonstrated considerable variation. This means that the magnitude of the Internet discourse type effect is very high. Further studies are needed to enlarge the number of examples with the increase in the amount of genres and their samples to achieve better balance.
Yoruba vowel deletion involves compensatory lengthening: evidence from phonetics
