Functions of Documentonyms-Abbreviations in the German Language of Economics and Management

Abstract

The article deals with the functions of documentonyms-abbreviations often used in the German language of economics and management. As a component of the peripheral onomastic zone, documentonyms- abbreviations form their own onomastic field and perform a number of important functions. Among them are the functions common to onyms in general, such as the address function and the function of an ethno-linguistic sign. Documentonyms-abbreviations indirectly perform a social function, because they indicate that these documents are aimed at meeting the needs of society in general and individual members of society in particular. Among the functions abbreviations perform in general is the function of compression, individualization and concretization, which is connected with the use of truncations, syllables and full words in the abbreviation, making it more recognizable; the pragmatic function and/ or the function of facilitating communication by replacing the original full prototype; dictionary enrichment function realizing their derivational potential, and the text-linking function. The specific functions of documentonyms-abbreviations are singled out. They include the function of identifying its correlation with certain management macrofields; the function of a marker that refers a document to one of the types of administrative documents; the function of an onomasiological feature or basis, depending on the position of the abbreviation in the composite created with the abbreviation-documentonym or on the position of the component in the abbreviation; the function of the top of lexical word-formation nests. The specifics of abbreviations-documentonyms are in the lack of the function of stylistic reduction, and the advertising function characteristic of other types of onyms, pragmatonyms and ergonyms, for example.