Shortening of words involves the shortening of both the words and word groups. Distinction should be made between shortening of a word in written speech graphical abbreviation and in the sphere intercourse lexical abbreviation.
Lexical abbreviation is the process of forming a word out of the initial elements either letters or morphemes. Thats why words that are made up by lexical abbreviation are called initials UK, USA. To this group also belong acronyms. This is a kind of initial which is read by a single word UNO.
Clipping consists in cutting off 2 or more syllables of a word. Words that have been shortened at the end are called apocope: e.g.: doc doctor. Words that have been shortened at the beginning are called aphaeresis: e.g.: phone telephone. Words that have been shortened from the middle are called — syncope: e.g.: specs spectacles; maths mathematics. There also can be a combination: e.g.: frige refrigerator. Onomatopoeia. Sound imitation. The naming of an action or a thing by a more or less reproduction of a natural sound associated with it. e.g.: babble. Semantically according to the source words they fall into a few definite groups. Many verbs denote sounds produced by humans in the process of communication or expressing their feelings: e.g.: chatter, murmur, whisper. There are sounds produced by animals, birds and insects: e.g.: hiss, raw, howl, buzz etc. The words imitating the sounds of water: splash; metal: clink, tickle.
In reduplication new words are made by doubling a stem either without any phonetic change like in bye-bye or with a variant of the root-vowel or consonant: e.g.: ping-pong, walkie-talkie. Most words made by reduplication represent informal groups: colloquialisms and slang.
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In reduplication new words are made by doubling a stem, either without any phonetic changes as in bye-bye (coll, for good-bye) or with a variation of the root-vowel or consonant as in ping-pong, chit-chat (this second type is called gradational reduplication).
This type of word-building is greatly facilitated in Modern English by the vast number of monosyllables. Stylistically speaking, most words made by reduplication represent informal groups: colloquialisms and slang. E. g. walkie-talkie ("a portable radio"), riff-raff ("the worthless or disreputable element of society"; "the dregs of society"), chi-chi (sl. for chic as in a chi-chi girl).
In a modern novel an angry father accuses his teenager son of doing nothing but dilly-dallying all over the town.
(dilly-dallying — wasting time, doing nothing, loitering)
Shortening (Contraction)
This comparatively new way of word-building has achieved a high degree of productivity nowadays, especially in American English.
Shortenings (or contracted/curtailed words) are produced in two different ways. The first is to make a new word from a syllable (rarer, two) of the original word. The latter may lose its beginning (as in phone made from telephone, fence from defence), its ending (as in hols from holidays, vac from vacation, props from properties, ad from advertisement) or both the beginning and ending (as in flu from influenza, fridge from refrigerator).
The second way of shortening is to make a new word from the initial letters of a word group: U.N.O. ['ju:neu] from the United Nations Organisation, B.B.C. from the British Broadcasting Corporation, M.P. from Member of Parliament. This type is called initial shortenings. They are found not only among formal words, such as the ones above, but also among colloquialisms and slang. So, g. f. is a shortened word made from the compound girl-friend.
Sound-Imitation (Onomatopoeia1)
Words coined by this interesting type of word-building are made by imitating different kinds of sounds that may be produced by animals, birds, insects, human beings and inanimate objects.
1 [onemaete'pie]. This type of word-formation is now also called echoism (the term was introduced by O. Jespersen).
It is of some interest that sounds produced by the same kind of animal are. frequently represented by quite different sound groups in different languages. For instance, English dogs bark (cf. the R. лаять) or howl (cf. the R. выть). The English cock cries cock-a-doodle-doo (cf. the R. ку-ка-ре-ку). In England ducks quack and frogs croak (cf. the R. крякать said about ducks and квакать said about frogs). It is only English and Russian cats who seem capable of mutual understanding when they meet, for English cats mew or miaow (meow). The same can be said about cows: they moo (but also low).
Some names of animals and especially of birds and insects are also produced by sound-imitation: crow, cuckoo, humming-bird, whip-poor-will, cricket.
