THE CURRENT STATUS OF RESEARCH ON SHORT WORDS IN THE GERMAN LANGUAGE

Abstract

The use of short words in all layers of specific, socio-political lexicon and in the press language becomes a characteristic of German. Short words have been experiencing a real “boom” in the German language for more than 60 years and are often replacing their full forms. The resulting abbreviations exist independently after they are fully lexicalized. In this article, reduced lexis is considered as one of the means of various specialist texts. The special features of the short words are described in connection with the development trends of the German language. For linguists, it is necessary to analyze a text and assess its various peculiarities, whether it is abbreviations, verbal abstracts, or occasionalisms. Each such linguistic phenomenon conceals certain factors for the overall text structure, developing textual-grammatical, textual-semantic, and textual-stylistic functions. All this offers linguists a broad field of research, the individual parts of which form the entire language system.