The Study of Systemacy of Technical Terms by Means of Semantic Network

The article focuses on the analysis of the principles of technical terms systemic organization within the terminology. Despite the general acceptance that systemacy is important in understanding the nature of the terminology lexicon, it has not been studied in detail and is usually mentioned in research papers when generalizations about structural or semantic regularities of technical terms belonging to a certain terminology are revealed. The hypothesis is that the peculiarities of systemacy as one of the key and defining characteristics of technical terms may be studied by means of modeling the terminology system using principles of semantic network construction. Consequently, the authors claim that the semantic network may reveal the adjacent technical terms as well as their overall number for each separate technical term in a terminological system and study the degree of systemacy and character of their systemic interaction. These constitute the objectives of the study. The examples are drawn from the actively developing terminology of nanotechnology sphere to illustrate and support the findings. A terminological network may be considered a type of a semantic network the vertices of which represent technical terms and arcs express the semantic relations between them. The suggested approach to terminological network construction presumes the division of the semantic relations as well as the classification of vertices into defined types that reflect the natural stratification of technical terms into categories in accordance with the specificity of their referents that makes it different from some earlier proposed methods. Thus, the terminology network allows a somewhat different perspective and more detailed study of the systemacy of technical terms within a given language for special purposes because it helps to identify the features of their organization and position of each technical term in relation to the adjacent technical terms. It may also shed light on the semantic relations that a given technical term sets up with the adjacent terms as well as those that are typical for certain categories of technical terms. The degree of adjacency is defined by means of division of the adjacent terms into the first order (that appear in the definition of the given technical term) and the second order (the conceptual relationship with which becomes clear in specialized texts). The analyzed fragment illustrates that nanopowder is related to technical terms of certain categories. Technical terms of the second order predominate. The technical terms of the first order (representing a generic concept, characteristics and constituent parts) establish AKO, At and PO semantic relations with the given technical term. Among the types of vertices predominate the category of process and the technical terms that refer to it are linked to nanopowder by R and Obj semantic relations. The article discusses why nanopowder does not establish some semantic relations with the technical terms of certain vertices types.

technical term, systemacy, semantic network, terminological network, semantic re lation, concept, category, definition

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