engleski

Inflection of Acronyms in Croatian

Acronyms cause interest from different linguistics perception such as lexical properties up to their sociolinguistic impact. Beside these in Croatian, as language with rich inflectional system, acronyms are interesting due to peculiarities in their morphosyntactic behavior. This work is based on corpus data of most frequent acronyms from Croatian National Corpus (hnk.ffzg.hr). In this paper we will face two problems of the inflection of the acronyms in Croatian. The first one is complete absence of declension in some very frequent acronyms, and the second one are the principles on which declinable acronyms acquire their inflectional class. This analysis reveals that 1) indeclinability of acronyms is based on graphical and pronunciation inconsistencies of derivational structures ; 2) the acronyms that inflect, demonstrate regular inflectional behavior. Data disclose that acronyms belong mostly to inflection class A (masculine class) and E (feminine class) and avoid inflectional paradigm for neuter nouns. In that respect they behave like foreign words that try to preserve their original phonological structure of lexical stem. According to revealed inflectional properties of the acronyms, we will classify acronyms according to inflectional patterns that are adequate for automatic generation of acronymic word-forms and their inclusion in Croatian Morphological Lexicon (hml.ffzg.hr).

acronyms; inflection; inflection type; Croatian Morphological Lexicon

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