Acronyms and neighboring categories in the language of photography

Abstract

This article focuses on the acronyms and related items, namely abbreviations, alphabetisms, blends, and clippings in the language of photography, a field that has not yet been previously examined. Numerous studies have dealt with these word-formation processes in the general language and, although to a lesser extent, in the different specialized languages. To date, despite the ubiquitous presence of photography in the modern world, no research has addressed the use of these categories in the language of photography, as one of many fields of ESP. This paper intends to fill this gap and to identify, analyze and classify acronyms, alphabetisms, abbreviations, blends, and clippings in the photography discourse focusing on their structure and characteristics. To fulfill this objective a corpus-based approach was followed. The data was gathered from professional photography blogs providing authentic up-to-date lexis. The results suggest that these categories abound in the language of photography. Although to a different extent, there are acronyms (e.g., lomo, gobo), alphabetisms (e.g., DSLR, TLR, HDR), abbreviations (e.g., Mpx, fps, mm), blends (squinch, digicam), and clippings (e.g., photog, cam, pano), apart from peripheral cases (e.g. 4K, B&W, RAW, L*a*b*) and hybrid categories (e.g. PNG, Jpeg, EOS, GAS).