ON SPECIFICS OF THE INTERDISCIPLINARY TERM FORMATION

The paper discusses some essential features of interdisciplinary
terms. Such terms appear as a result of the symbiosis of various
fields: linguistics and politics, linguistics and economics,
linguistics and sociology, etc. The author briefly analyzes some
extra-linguistic reasons for the formation of interdiscipline
terminology (e.g., language policy, language economics, feminist
criticism of language, gender linguistics): the development of
scientific views and the increase of scientific disciplines, inter –
and transdisciplinarity of modern sciences, globalization, etc. The
linguistic reasons for the emergence of interdisciplinary terms
include synonymy, the language economy, homonymy, etc.
The focus of this study is mainly aimed at structural, semantic
and functional features of terms, representing such a rapidly
developing interdisciplinary field as economics of language or
language economics. The analysis of theoretical literature on the
problem reveals the lack of knowledge of this problem in the
Russian linguistics. As a result, the author attempts to briefly
highlight the history of the development of the economy of
language, to highlight the stages of the emergence of terminology
and to find new terms included in the composition forming the
conceptual-terminological apparatus of the economy of language.
Both dictionary and context materials (research literature on the
economics of language; sociolinguistic, educational, and
economic documentation; websites of translation and educational
companies, as well as media) were analyzed. In this study the
methods of lexicographic, corpus and structural-semantic analysis
were used. Lexicographical analysis shows that many
interdisciplinary terms are usually fixed not only in explanatory,
translated bilingual, but also in specialized dictionaries
(linguistic, sociolinguistic, sociological, political, etc.). Thus, the
terminology of feminist criticism of language, developed in
gender linguistics, is codified in dictionaries of different types.
Terms from the field of language economics are not yet fully
represented in lexicographical sources.
The conceptual and terminological apparatus of the language
economy is at different stages of development in different
languages. The study of structural-functional and pragmatic
characteristics of the terms makes it possible to speak about the
active development of the terminological system in the English
language and the emerging terminology in the Russian and
German languages.
Corpus and discursive analysis of interdisciplinary terms allows
us to build a hierarchical structure and identify thematic and
conceptual groups of the terminological field, forming a central, a
near-central and a peripheral zones. As the study shows, the term
systems are not closed, the boundaries between the adjoining
terminological systems of interacting disciplines are blurred. This
contributes to the quantification of terms and provides for term
systems overlapping.
As a result of the structures’ and semantics’ analysis of such
words, it is possible to find their semantic and formal features
(including their derivation). It is shown that most of the economic
terms in English and Russian are represented by word
collocations (including terms and/or term elements of various
disciplines), the dominant position is occupied by composites in
the German language, e.g.: Engl. language management, Rus.
языковой менеджмент (yazykovoj menedzhment), Germ.
Sprachmanagement. This phenomenon is explained by the
peculiarities of word-formation types and models of the wordformation systems of these languages. In the terminology, the
variability caused by assimilation of borrowed terms, most of
which are of English origin, is revealed. Structural and semantic
variation is typical, as a rule, for borrowed lexemes in German
and Russian.
The analysis of research literature and empirical material reveals
that interdisciplinary terms are mostly used in scientific and
official business functional styles and are not used in colloquial
speech. The results determine the place and the important role of
the interdisciplinary terminological vocabulary in the literary
subsystems of national languages.
Keywords: interdisciplinary term, intersystem terminologies,
variation.