STRUCTURAL AND SEMANTIC ORGANIZATION OF SPECIAL AEROSPACE VOCABULARY IN ENGLISH

Abstract

The article studies aerospace terminological vocabulary typical of modern English. The topicality of the research from both theoretical and practical standpoints is stipulated by the need for a special comprehensive analysis of structural and semantic features of the aerospace lexical units, the number of which in recent years has considerably grown and become diversified due to the transition to the information society, steady scientific and technological progress that requires filling in constantly emerging nominative gaps. The authors have selected 290 terms of the aerospace industry, mainly functioning in the English texts of scientific and popular scientific genres of the early XXI century. The aim of the paper is to identify and analyse the main structural and semantic features of the vocabulary in question. To reach this aim, the authors have applied a complex of general scientific and linguistic methods adequate to the research purpose. The systematized and analysed material showed that the main source of this terminology enrichment is word formation on the basis of both specific and borrowed derivational resources, while external borrowings are rather small. The analysis of the structural organization of the English aerospace terms allowed singling out three main groups of such units, namely: single-word terms, composite terms, and phrase-terms. It has been found out that among all the derivational methods of the aerospace lexical units’ formation, syntactic word formation, i.e. creation of various terms-phrases, significantly dominates. It is proved that in recent years within the scope of the English aerospace terminology twocomponent special combinations formed by several structural models prevail. The most common of them is the A + N model. The two-component terms are also formed through other models which are identified as unproductive: N + A; N + pr. + N; N + is + A. Besides, in the analysed field, three-component terms are rather significant; among them the dominant position is occupied by the model A + A + N, while the other models are unproductive: N + pr. + N + pr. + N; V + N + pr. + N. Four-component and five-component models have low word formation productivity. The analysed English terms of aerospace sphere convincingly demonstrate that their significant part arose on the basis of the morphological word formation pattern. A considerable number of the studied terms are represented by various complex words formed by means of word formation, abbreviation, and telescoping. Suffixation, prefixation, prepositional formations, and semantic method of derivation are also employed to the formation of aerospace one-word terms of modern English.