Lech Krajewski, Acronyms – fetishes and passkeys in the linguistic communication of subcultures
Key words:
youth subculture language, acronyms, formative linguistic play, onomasiology Reinterpretation
Summary:
Acronyms as an announcements of youth subcultures, purposely created with expressive intention (it results from the pragmatics to generate names which perform an information role or are recommendations) demand from the receiver during a perception process not only of linguistic knowledge of the world preserved in the condensed and quite often homophonic form but also an emotional, linguistic intuition because they are involved in the formative linguistic play and semasiology reinterpretation. Besides acronyms, resembling abbreviations already existing in the colloquial Polish language, there are linguistic units created by youth not only from multi-word compositions, but also from single words and even from its fragments (most often outerspeech) and finally from sentences, elliptical syntactic construction of which deciphering for an average observer is difficult. Multi-incentiveness complicates acronyms semantic interpretation and causes them to be fetish and passkey in understanding subcultures.