Frequency of prototypical acronyms in American TV series

Abstract

This article aims at studying acronyms found in captions of six American TV series, as most scholarly articles only discuss abbreviations and acronyms in specialized texts, including their titles and abstracts as well. Hence, in the introductory part, we present reasons to use shortened forms (both abbreviations and acronyms), and then we offer a very brief summary of major types of shortenings, differentiating shorter forms originating from one-word or multi-word phrases, enabling us to separate acronyms, initialisms, and alphabetisms from standard abbreviations and its similar terms (truncation and clipping). After arguing that acronym may be used as the umbrella term for initialisms and alphabetisms as well, we define prototypical acronyms, which are traced in the first seasons of the six TV series with the help of a specifically designed algorithm. Acronym frequency in three medical TV series is compared to their frequency in political, legal, and military series, concluding that at least twice more acronyms were found in medical captions compared to non-medical ones, which means that an acronym is bound to appear within every other minute of the storyline. The conclusion section reiterates the idea that acronym use should be restricted, knowing that guidelines on captioning and subtitling have little impact on the creators.