Acronyms As Incisive Membership Signals

Martin & Rose (2007: 305):

Contraction refers to the amount of work it takes to exchange meanings, and the idea that the better you know someone the less explicitness it takes. Poynton exemplifies this in part through naming, pointing out that knowing someone very well involves short names, knowing them less well longer ones. For outsiders, Stevie might be introduced as Texas bluesman Stevie Ray Vaughan for example, whereas for hardcore fans just his initials will do:

Texas bluesman Stevie Ray Vaughan

Stevie Ray Vaughan

Stevie Ray

Stevie

SRV

Technically speaking, the less information a homophoric reference contains, the tighter the community it constructs and the more people it excludes. Acronyms in general are incisive [sic] membership signals in this respect, as are all of the resources noted in Martin 2000a under the heading of involvement (e.g. swearing, slang, antilanguage, specialised and technical lexis).

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, this is "reference" in the sense of ideational denotation, which Martin & Rose confuse with textual reference — homophoric or otherwise — in their model of textual discourse semantics, IDENTIFICATION, as explained in the examination of that system (Chapter 5).

[2] To be clear, acronyms do not contain less information, they express the same amount of information in reduced form. In any case, this bare assertion is invalidated by all the acronyms that are not inclusive membership signals, such as:

• ASAP
• AWOL
• ATM
• PIN
• SCUBA
• LASER
• RADAR
• NASA
• NATO
• UN
• UNESCO
• CIA
• FBI