The English Economic Term ‘Human Capital’ and Its Semantic Field in Scientific Discourse

Cover Page

Cite item

Full Text

Abstract

Recently, human capital (HC) has acquired special relevance in response to digital economy development. A semantic study of HC is significant for its linguistic description and practical purposes of teaching business English to students, specializing in economics and management. The aims of the research were to analyze dictionary definitions, compare them with contextual interpretations, and identify syntagmatic relations and lexical collocability of the term HC in scientific discourse. 340 article titles and their abstracts from 18 journals on economics and management served as the material for the research. The methods included continuous sampling, analysis of contextual relations, semantic classification, and componential analysis. The results of definition analysis showed that HC has intangible components of meaning and partly overlaps with resources , in opposition to capital which has monetary nature. Contextual interpretations disclose more semantic aspects of HC. Monetary relations and production factors make it closer to capital . Considerable attention is paid to HC formation and measurement. Terms, related to HC, embrace a wide variety of phenomena from almost all functional areas of business, which indicate the importance of HC for sustainable development, increasing profit and competitiveness. Semantic classification of collocations shows that HC is considered at the personal, organizational and national levels. The most frequent syntagmatic sequences include HC+N , N+Prep.+HC , and Adj.+HC . Objective valency type: V+HC is more common than subjective: HC+V . The most frequent collocations are HC accumulation , HC investments , and the role of HC .

About the authors

Yulia A Filyasova

Saint-Petersburg University of Management Technologies and Economics

Author for correspondence.
Email: phill.yield@gmail.com

Candidate of Philological Sciences, Associate Professor of the Department of Pedagogy, Psychology and Translation Studies

Saint-Petersburg, Russia

References

  1. Halliday M.A.K., Martin J.R. (1993). Writing science: literacy and discursive power. Pittsburgh.
  2. Kobozeva I.M. (2000). Linguistic semantics. Moscow. (In Russ.)
  3. Trier, J. (1931). Der deutsche Wortschatz im Sinnbezirk des Verstandes, Ph.D. diss. Bonn.
  4. Shchur G.S. (2009). The theory of field in linguistics. 3rd ed. Moscow. (In Russ.)
  5. Admoni V.G. (1964). Fundamentals of grammar theory. Moscow. (In Russ.)
  6. Bondarko A.V. (1999). Fundamentals of functional grammar. Saint-Petersburg. (In Russ.)
  7. Abramov V.P., Abramova G.A. (2017). Structural and Functional Approaches to Semantic Fields Analysis. RUDN Journal of Russian and Foreign Languages Research and Teaching, 15 (1), 9-25. (In Russ.)
  8. Ufimtseva A.A. (1986). Lexical meaning. Moscow. (In Russ.)
  9. Kobozeva I.M. (2016), Lexical items in a grammar: functions, categorization, constraints. Russian Language Abroad, 3, 51-55. (In Russ.)
  10. Shvedova N.Y. (2005). The Russian language. Moscow. (In Russ.)
  11. Katsnel’son S.D. (1948). About grammatical category. Bulletin of Leningrad State University, 2, 114-134. (In Russ.)
  12. Ten’er, L. (1988). Fundamentals of structural syntax. Moscow. (In Russ.)
  13. Denisenko V.N. (2011). Semantic field: Syntagmatics and paradigmatics. RUDN Journal of Language Studies, Semiotics and Semantics, 2, 18-24. (In Russ.)
  14. Averina A.V. (2019). Valency of modal words and particles in German. Bulletin of Moscow Region State University. Series: Linguistics, 2, 43-52. (In Russ.)
  15. Filyasova Yu.A. (2019). Effectiveness vs. efficiency: an analysis of valency and collocability in a technical context. RUDN Journal of Language Studies, Semiotics and Semantics, 10 (1), 187-196.
  16. Kasimova G.K. (2013). Comparative analysis of semantic structure of cognate derivatives. RUDN Journal of Linguistics, 4, 93-101. (In Russ.)
  17. Mukhachyova I.V. (2019). Semantic valencies of the verb rasstegnut’ (to unbutton) and ineffability of semantic valencies. Rhema. Rema, 1, 48-64. (In Russ.)
  18. Paymakova E.A. (2010). Some semantic aspects of the English antonymous adjectives (a study of HEAVY and LIGHT). RUDN Journal of Language Studies, Semiotics and Semantics, 1, 21-27. (In Russ.)
  19. Rice S., Newman J. (2018). A Corpus Investigation of English Cognition Verbs and their Effect on the Incipient Epistemization Physical Activity Verbs. Russian Journal of Linguistics, 22 (3), 560-580.
  20. Trufanova I.V. (2017). Lexicographic portrait of a pronoun other. RUDN Journal of Language Studies, Semiotics and Semantics, 8(3), 509-518. (In Russ.)
  21. Yudina N.V. (2014). Terminology of kinship relations in the Russian language discourse of the 21st century. The Scientific Opinion, 9, 13-23. (In Russ.)
  22. Kelly G.J. (2014). Discourse practices in science learning and teaching. Handbook of research on science education, vol. II. New York. P. 321-336.
  23. McComas W.F. (2014). Scientific Discourse (Rhetoric of Science). The Language of Science Education. Rotterdam.
  24. Filyasova Yu.A. (2015). Continuous and end-of-module assessment system modelling for second language communicative competence evaluation. RUDN Journal of Russian and Foreign Languages Research and Teaching, 4, 220-223. (In Russ.)
  25. Kostin A.V. (2018). From informational to digital society. Human capital in the format of digital economy: Conference proceedings. 16 Febr. 2018. Moscow. P. 72-80. (In Russ.)
  26. Economics Letters. URL: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/economics-letters (accessed: 7.04.2019).
  27. The Economics of Education Review. URL: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/economics-of-education-review (accessed: 10.04.2019).
  28. Economic Modelling. URL: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/economic-modelling (accessed: 12.04.2019).
  29. The Journal of Human Capital. URL: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/jhc (accessed: 15.04.2019).
  30. The Journal of Intellectual Capital. URL: https://www.emeraldinsight.com/loi/jic (accessed: 18.04.2019).
  31. Labour Economics. URL: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/labour-economics (accessed: 20.04.2019).
  32. Journal of Management. URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/home/jom (accessed: 24.04.2019).
  33. Review of Development Economics. URL: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14679361 (accessed: 25.04.2019).
  34. The Journal of Human Resources. URL: http://jhr.uwpress.org/ (accessed: 28.04.2019)
  35. The Journal of Comparative Economics. URL: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-comparative-economics (accessed: 1.05.2019).
  36. The Journal of Monetary Economics. URL: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-monetary-economics (accessed: 3.05.2019).
  37. Strategic Management Journal. URL: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10970266 (accessed: 5.05.2019).
  38. International Economic Review. URL: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14682354 (accessed: 7.05.2019).
  39. Journal of Economic Surveys. URL: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14676419 (accessed: 10.05.2019).
  40. The Human Resource Management Journal. URL: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/ 17488583 (accessed: 12.05.2019).
  41. Global Business Review. URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/home/gbr (accessed: 14.05.2019).
  42. The Human Resource Management Review. URL: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/human-resource-management-review (accessed: 15.05.2019).
  43. The Journal of Finance. URL: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/15406261 (accessed: 16.05.2019).
  44. Cambridge Dictionary. URL: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/ (accessed: 18.05.2019).
  45. ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA. URL: https://www.britannica.com/ (accessed: 19.05.2019).
  46. Macmillan Dictionary. URL: https://www.macmillandictionary.com/ (accessed: 21.05.2019).
  47. The Business Dictionary. URL: http://www.businessdictionary.com/ (accessed: 24.05.2019).

Copyright (c) 2019 Filyasova Y.A.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

This website uses cookies

You consent to our cookies if you continue to use our website.

About Cookies