ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS AS GENERATING BASES FOR VERBAL NEOLOGISMS IN ENGLISH

Abstract

The article examines the verbal neologism to ICE, formed from the acronym of the same name and not recorded in dictionaries at the moment. ICE stands for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement: this agency is engaged in the detention and deportation of illegal immigrants. Based on the contexts of use from the American forum Reddit, the shades of meaning of this verb, the features of its functioning, and the degree of expressiveness are determined, and a translation of the contexts into Russian is given. According to the results of the study, ICE is a politically themed verb and is used by speakers to condemn the actions of said agency. An analysis of the contexts shows that people are afraid and distrustful of ICE and want to the same sanctions to be applied to the people they dislike. This is due to the fact that a significant part of the user base of the Reddit forum does not welcome Donald Trump’s policy and perceives the US Republican Party negatively. It appears that abbreviations and acronyms are productive bases for the formation of verbs by conversion in the English language, especially in the colloquial Internet environment which values rapid exchange of information while maintaining the expressiveness of the message. The emergence of such words turns out to be the implementation of the law of linguistic economy and self-organization of language as a system. Such verbs include an incorporated actant which makes these units as twice as economical. In fact, these verbs equal to compressed phrases with a verb. Identification of verb formations of this type is possible due to the context and background knowledge of the researcher. The number of verbal neologisms with abbreviations and acronyms as a generating base will grow over time.