A-bleaching

[trochee]

I can't remember if I've mentioned this before on Livejournal, but solri's recent complaints about "Theory" rang a bell for me, and I thought I'd spread a useful metalinguistic concept around a little.

A-bleaching: the process by which an acronym or abbreviation moves from full compositionality to -- at the extreme end -- complete lexicalization.

Examples are fairly easy to find in technical work -- acronyms and abbreviations tend to be most obviously A-bleached when they are used in ways that are "redundant"; these are usually considered "anacronyms", a cutesy word describing accidental A-bleaching:

• laser radiation
• scuba apparatus
• the NATO organization

However, the new term "A-bleaching" is particularly interesting in the case of deliberate A-bleaching:

Deliberate A-bleaching: In particular, this term should be used to describe cases where the acronym is still obviously an acronym, but the community-of-use deliberately refuses (for "theoretical" reasons) to allow spell-out. Canonical examples of deliberate bleaching could be "move-alpha", "D-structure", and "PF", where "alpha" is (intra-discipline historically) derived from "A-structure" < "Argument structure", and "D-structure" < "Deep structure" and "PF" < "Phonetic form" --- and yet in all three cases, much contemporary theory denies any relationship of these terms to "deep"ness, "argument"s or "phonetics". The original, compositional meaning has been deliberately bleached.

Possible causes of deliberate A-bleaching:

1. Physics envy: by using things with obscure and technical-sounding names (like "a-bar movement" or "little v"), the field gains an aura of mathematical-seeming precision.
2. Attempts to retain results while changing theory: by retaining the conceptual slots of the older theories, the new theory may be trying to maintain the relevance of the older work, while proposing a new interpretation of that work.
3. Abstraction of two similar concepts: It's possible that (under some circumstances) two different phenomena can be unified together into a single concept. Assigning this concept an abstract name has worked for physics and math. But see #1 above.
4. Exclusion of outsiders: like any field, jargon serves two purposes. It can be used as a shorthand for useful packages of information, and it can be used as a shibboleth to exclude those who have not been inducted into the secret wisdoms. What better shibboleth than a collection of explicitly opaque symbols?

PS: yes, the term "A-bleaching" is my own invention.
PPS: yes, I am aware that the term "deliberate A-bleaching" is autological [as is my username], because it attempts to unify "acronym bleaching" and "abbreviation bleaching" (type #3 above).

Comments

[congogirl.livejournal.com]

ATM machine

[http://users.livejournal.com/_dkg_/]

Computer engineering is full of the simple A-bleachings:

The specification for HTTP/1.1 even includes the term HTTP Protocol directly, which is weird because HTTP isn't even pronounceable the way SCUBA or LASER are.

But i agree that the deliberate A-bleachings are more interesting because of the underlying semantic shift that takes place.

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

Wow. Brother makes a brief appearance as he pulls his foot out from under the sheet. :)

[trochee.livejournal.com]

See my latest post on this subject for a new deliberate-A-bleaching.