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This article considers abbreviations as signs widely used in the contemporary Russian media. The study aims at analysing abbreviations and their functions, finding their connotative meanings and defining their types alongside the reasons behind their appearance. The main aim of this paper is to study abbreviations from the point of view of receptive linguistics, i.e. their perception by readers and listeners. The methodological basis of the research is to prove that an abbreviation is used to: а) make a social factor underlying such a parameter of the secondary sign as a tendency to sacralisation of a particular field of knowledge and b) is independent both from the semantic and the stylistic points of view, which is explained by evaluative connotations that are not inherent in the producing base. The theoretical basis of the study of the word-forming structure and functions of abbreviations are works by E. Zemskaya and E. Klobukov. The research material includes contexts taken from such media sources as Ogonyok , Izvestiya , Kommersant , Literaturnaya Gazeta , Moskovsky Komsomolets , etc. alongside examples from linguistic studies on abbreviations (S. A. Nikishina, А. P. Skovorodnikov). The most important conclusions of the research are as follows: 1. The purely nominative function of abbreviations, which is used to determine their status as a secondary sign, is being replaced by the expressive function in the modern media, making them an independent sign, pragmatically different from their producing base; 2. The wide use of abbreviations in the modern Russian spoken language can be explained not only by the principle of the speaker’s need to save their linguistic effort, but also by the tendency to “corporatise” the language in certain spheres (power structures, bureaucratic apparatus); 3. The influx of abbreviations in modern political speech and media speech has made these language signs an object of aesthetic evaluation (often negative), primarily because of their dissonance ( УМДиДО , нацбест ) and/or emerging undesirable associations with negative vocabulary content ( МРОТ is associated with the Russian word mryot “dies”), or with stylistically reduced vocabulary ( МУДО , РЯФКА , педобр ). The attitude of native speakers to abbreviations (which is often negative) lets the authors consider these signs an object of receptive linguistics; 4. The way in which an abbreviation is introduced into the text is determined by the degree of its general familiarity. Good speech style and respect for the addressee always imply that an abbreviation should be decoded; 5. The abbreviation also can “re-produce meaning” by introducing it into a well-known word “container” ( коронОРВИрус ). The mechanism of such a word formation is paronymic attraction.