OT on Initialism: the role of letter names
Becky Treiman and other people in the reading research circle have long noted the lasting influence of letter names. Children often start with a letter-name strategy in their first attempts to spell.
Bob Kennedy recently took a different look at the effect of letter names, this time with people’s initials. Some combinations sounds good but not others:
Basically, the prediction is that initials like FT, MT, ST, TF, TQ, TX, and so on are acceptable as over-the-phone usages. FL, MR, MF, and so on are not.
Second, it shouldn’t take long to find counterexamples in which two VC letters do sound alright next to each other. FM, XM, MS, and MX are some that do sound OK to me. I suspect this is the case because each is an abbreviation for some other non-onomastic use; FM and XM for radio, MS for citations and Microsoft, and MX for the legendary Reagan-era nuclear missile.
He then tried to formalize the observations and move toward an Optimality Theory framework, but was stuck halfway because of initials that include VC letters such as M, S, and F. It seems to be ok to have one of them, but not two. In OT, this means that it’s ok to violate the Onset constraint once but not twice. As Eric Bakovic pointed out in the comment, this requires local conjunction.
The commentaries are just as interesting as Bob’s initial analysis. Bob also mentioned earlier research by Heidi Harley on spelled-out abbreviations vs. acronyms, and a paper by her on the same topic.