The phenomena of Telescopy in Modern French

Abstract

The increased interest toward the issue of telescopy shows that the nature of the phenomenon remains controversial. There is no unity in the terminology used to identify the types of words being studied. Researchers that touch on the subject of telescopy vary in their opinion of how the nature and place of telescopic units should identify within the word formation system. In existing works, authors predominantly study the special features of the formal structure of the words being studied. This category includes lexical units created as the result of combining fragments of truncated words. The nature of truncation and/or the nature of combination of word components is taken into account. With this approach, distinguishing telescopic words from other types of lexical units presents certain difficulties, as the boundaries between the externally similar to telescopic words, for example, the affix words or the words with complex abbreviations, are difficult to establish. The tendency to view the telescopic words mainly on a morphological level does not allow to reveal the essence of these telescopic words. In the present paper, telescopic words are considered as words of synctactic nature – lexical units of inter-level morphological-syntactic method of word formation, which is commonly used in the terms’ formation. The analysis of the structural and functional features of telescopic words has allowed to reveal their specific features, which make it possible to distinguish these words from their otherwise externally similar lexical units.