LEXICO-SEMANTIC PECULIARITIES OF ACRONYMS OF MODERN ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Abstract

The article analyzes the lexical-semantic peculiarities of acronyms of modern English based on materials of modern SMS-correspondence. It has been established that appearance of contests of SMS-poems clearly show the popularity of SMS-language. Moreover, a book, devoted to the art of shortenings, is going to be published in the UK. In addition, Oxford University philologists include a short vocabulary used in writing SMS-messages in a short Oxford dictionary. With the help of SMS-language, young people ask out for a date and even confess their love. A number of the most popular acronyms based on materials of modern SMScorrespondence has been analyzed. Overall, the lexical unit LOL is derived from Laughing Out Loud or Lots Of Laughs, with semantic meanings such as 1. loud laughter; 2. a jest about someone. At the first sight, it may seem that these meanings are synonymous, but there are some differences between them. The lexical unit LOL, meaning “a jest about someone”, appeared in the 1990s. American programmers invented the abbreviation. At that time, it was popular to learn programming languages and be fond of systems, but most people, who took this up, did not understand much, but believed that they were doing everything right. These people began to be called LOL (lamer on-line). It has been generalized that the components of the abbreviation ILY are the syntactical unit I Love You with the respective semantic meaning. Usually, this abbreviation is used in communication on the Internet. It is frequently replaced by other abbreviations with the same semantic meaning. It may be ILU. The shortening appeared from I love you, but the unit YOU was replaced with its consonant phoneme “U”. Sometimes, when looking at the correspondence between young people, you can find the following set of numbers: 143. This number also characterizes the expression I Love You. Abbreviations are used by people of any age in spoken language, in the Internet communication, in different fields of professional activity (in medicine, military and business spheres, etc.). They can be found in advertisements and on product packaging. Names of some restaurants are also represented in the form of abbreviations. Those shortenings and abbreviations have also been widely used in modern American fiction literature.