ECONOMIZATION IN INFORMAL ELECTRONICALLY MEDIATED COMMUNICATION: ELLIPSES AND SENTENTIAL ALPHABETISMS

Abstract

The paper looks at the phenomenon of sentential alphabetisms and the combination of economization processes applied to their production. The term alphabetism is used as a broad category to cover acronyms and initialisms which both result from acronymization processes. The focus is on sentential alphabetisms and their unacronymized equivalents with the aim to verify the assumption that economization in a significant number of cases involves a combination of processes at the lexical level (acronymization) and the syntactic level (syntactic ellipsis).