Initialisms & co.: Lexical and stylistic choices in scientific terminology

In specialized, scientific and technical discourse, there is a general tendency towards the use of complex noun phrases and nominalizations referring back to previously introduced ideas and concepts (Altieri Biagi 1974; Halliday 1988; Cortelazzo 1990; Gotti 1991, 2003, 2005; Williams 2004; Álvarez de Mon y Rego 2006; Garzone 2008; Mattiello 2010). By contrast, due to the increasing popularization of some forms of scientific discourse, there seems to be also an opposite tendency to use initialisms (e.g. GFP ← Green Fluorescent Protein), acronyms (e.g. CRIIGEN ← Committee for Research & Independent Information on Genetic ENgineering), clippings (e.g. combo ← combination), back-formations (e.g. to lase/lasing ← laser), and related items to condense information into smaller units, especially when they are highly accessible to the whole community or even lexicalized (DNA, HIV, lab, laser, NASA). This latter tendency obeys two general principles. One is the well-known Principle of Linguistic Economy (Martinet 1955), after Zipf’s (1949) Principle of Least Effort, according to which shorter and simpler communication is favoured over redundancy. The other is the Principle of Naming (Mattiello 2013), according to which scientists often encounter or create new objects or concepts and are compelled to name them. This study investigates the terminology used in two renowned scientific journals – Nature and Science – whose primary audience comprises research scientists, but which also have an impact on the educated general public, especially in their circulation on the Web. The aim is to show that scientific language often makes use of abbreviatory operations: 1) to assign concepts, phenomena and processes more efficient and specific labels which can circulate internationally, and 2) to avoid textual redundancy, while maintaining the lexical cohesion of the text. The socio-pragmatic effects of the use of these operations are: 3) to achieve professional closeness among in-group experts, and 4) especially in news headlines, to catch the attention of readers and excite their curiosity. These functions and effects are chiefly evident in Internet versions of scientific journals, as corroborated by a comparison between paper versions of Nature (January 1972, January 2002) and the articles of Nature published online in January 2012. Theoretically, it will be shown that word-formation phenomena that are generally neglected by morphologists (Aronoff 1976; Scalise 1984; Spencer 1991; Haspelmath 2002), or marginalized to extra-grammatical morphology (Dressler and Merlini Barbaresi 1994; Conti and Mattiello 2008; Mattiello 2008, 2013), deserve attention on account of their strong impact on the receiver, and of their frequency and wide exploitation in specialized discourse (Mattiello 2012). Although they do not change meaning and therefore do not form new words, they result in a change at the stylistic level (Bauer 1983), often becoming more specialized than their bases (Bat-El 2000; Fradin 2003).