O Comportamento das Siglas e dos Acrónimos em Textos de Economia

The presence of initialisms and acronyms in the most diverse areas of knowledge reflects the evolution of contemporary society, which incessantly appeals to the economy and speed in oral and written communication. The interest in studying linguistic reduction phenomena increases substantially when one sees their predominance in the vocabulary of specialised languages, in scientific and technical texts.
The insufficient delimitation of the boundaries between initialism, acronym and other competing terms, conveyed by the current definitions of linguistic reductions is the starting point of this investigation. Based on a corpus of online press texts, in the field of Economics, and Stock Exchange in particular, given my experience as a journalist-editor in the area in question, we proceed to analyze the problematic aroused by such linguistic phenomena and the specificities of the reduced terminological units present in the corpus.
In this sense, the modes of representation of reductions are discussed considering their structure, namely the number of characters, among other variables, as well as the implications of the principle of economy in the formation of initialisms and acronyms. Different levels of evolution in the use are observed, given the passage of reductions from writing to speech. A reflection is made on the rules of use and the predominantly denominative functions of reductions. It is presented a statistical analysis of the most productive subdomains involved in the creation of initialisms and acronyms within the field of economics. This study also examines the role of linguistic loans based on initialisms and acronyms, discusses the translation problems resulting therefrom, as well as the importance of these phenomena as processes of neology creation. Finally, we advance the proposal of a terminological dictionary of initialisms and acronyms in the field of Economics.