Specificity of Dictionary Description of Abbreviation Appellatives and Onyms

Abstract

The article is focused on the comparison of abbreviations-appellatives and abbreviations onyms, units that are abbreviated equivalents of divided common nouns and proper nouns respectively. It is not customary in Russian language studies to differentiate abbreviations according to the above categories, and, as a consequence, abbreviated appellatives and onyms are considered to be identical language units in terms of their origin and purpose. The aim of this work is to establish the basic differences between abbreviated appellatives and onyms and to substantiate the obligatory nature of this distinction in their research and description. The relevance of the research is determined by the need to develop a new approach to the lexicographic description of abbreviations, which emerged in connection with the modern trend to create multi-informative dictionaries of abbreviations. The study’s novelty stems from its identification of the specific features of abbreviations-appellatives and abbreviations-onyms as lexicographic units for the first time. The article contains a brief review of theoretical studies and dictionaries of abbreviations, which form a general idea of the established tradition of studying abbreviations. Different mechanisms of abbreviations appellatives and abbreviations-onyms formation and their influence on the functioning of linguistic units in texts are considered. On the basis of the published dictionaries of abbreviations the peculiarities of the dictionary description of abbreviations apellatives and abbreviations-onyms are established. The author reviews dictionary entries from specialized dictionaries, which can be offered as models of differentiated vocabulary description of abbreviated appellatives and onyms.