A Study On Abbreviations In Official Documents

The official document abbreviation is a special language form used widely in the official documents.The official document abbreviation, as an important part of the official document vocabulary,can make official documents more brief in form but rich in content. Studying on official documents not only improves the study of abbreviations, but also makes the usage of official abbreviations more normative to average up abilities of official workers. Therefore, the study is useful for linguistics and official writing.The official document abbreviation is carefully described in this essay through anterior study and more than one thousand eight hundred official document abbreviations. The theory of Cognitive Linguistic and Cognitive Psychology, such as image schema and mapping mode, is used to study the forming factors, mapping progress, normative usage and so on,by qualitative and quantitative analysis.There are five parts in this essay. The introduction is to state the latest progress and research status of abbreviations, especially the cognitive study of abbreviations, which illuminates a new direction for the study of the official document abbreviation. The official document abbreviation is carefully described in the second chapter. The definition of official document abbreviations is defined and classified by syllables,the range of its usage or constructions. We put forward six methods to shorten the prior form which are initial, acronym, clipping, blending,substitution and definition.The third chapter is to study the causes and conditions of forming the abbreviation. We think that the nature of trade,cognitive ability,linguistic economical principles and perioddevelopment of language are the main factors of forming official abbreviations. In the forth chapter, we discussed the forming of official document abbreviation from Cognitive Linguistics. Bodied experience,image schema,mapping principles and monotony are the producing mechanism.Mapping approaches,principles and reasons are discussed in this part. The methods to cut original form are physical distance of language and meaning period and the mapping approaches are single mapping, one to one mapping,overlapped mapping and selective mapping. There are two important principles in forming abbreviations which are the principles of prominence and circumvention. The chapter five is to discuss the norms of using and coining shortened-form of official document abbreviations. The main content is concluded in the last part which analyses the progress and weak-points in this essay. We hope to offer a new angle of view for those who come later to study the official document abbreviations.