On the Types and Properties of Term Abbreviations from the Perspective of Word Formation-focused on Term Abbreviations in Urimalsaem

Abstract

This paper aims at revealing the types and properties of term abbreviations in Urimalsaem. Until now, abbreviations have been discussed only in the basic types such as AC, AD, BC, and BD. However, even when targeting term abbreviations for Urimalsaem, the types are not so simple. In this respect, in order to categorize 794 term abbreviations of Urimalsaem, in addition to the ‘basic type’, ‘extended type’ and ‘applied type’ were assumed. In addition, the ‘complex type’ which is combined with the basic type and the extended type was considered as a separate type, and those that did not belong to any type were grouped into ‘other type’. Through this classification, except for ‘other type’, they were subdivided into 11 extended types, 14 applied types, and 1 complex types in addition to 4 basic types. This results clearly show that the term abbreviation types are very complicated themselves. These abbreviation types have a very high sum of the proportions of the extended, applied, and complex types, although the proportion of the overall basic types is over half at 53.4%. In the case of the AD type, the ratio of the extended type (15.74%) is more than twice as high as that of the basic type (16.30%). On the other hand, compared to the ratio of AC and AD types, BC and BD types are not very productive in abbreviation methods because the sum is only 5.66% of them. When it comes to the abbreviation type, it can also be seen that the number of syllables plays a very important role in the formation of abbreviations. On the other hand, as the structural characteristics of the abbreviation, AC and AD types with the highest type frequency and item frequency were mentioned. The relationship between acronyms for AC type and blended words for AD type was also noted. In addition, among the term abbreviations, some elements appear repeatedly and continuously as former or latter position. Some of them are affixes, but others are not. Therefore, they can be separately called ‘abbreviators’. It is worth noting that these abbreviators make us predict the type of term abbreviations not just in current but also in future.