Features of the Formation of Terminology Systems of Non-Humanitarian Disciplines

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Введение. Постановка проблемы

Terms and their systemic properties as a reflection of the structure of scientific knowledge have been the focus of researchers for about a hundred years. Currently, there is an intensification of scientific interest in the analysis of specialized vocabulary, motivated by the formation of new terminology systems [1-7] and the crystallization of the vocabulary of existing ones [8-11], as well as the development of lexicography technologies [12; 13]. The relevance of the proposed is based on the existing scientific and practical interest of researchers in the terminology of new branches of knowledge, for example, artificial intelligence [14], in comparison with the analysis of the terminology system of the hydraulic engineering industry, which has developed mainly on Russian material [15], and the terminology system of state and municipal procurement, which is in the process of formation [16].

A school of terminology has developed in Russian linguistics: D.S. Lotte [17], G.O. Vinokur [18], A.A. Reformatsky [19], V.M. Leychik [20], V.P. Danilenko [21], E.A. Sorokina [22] and S.V. Grinev-­Grinevich [23; 24], V.F. Novodranova [25] and many others, demonstrating a significant theoretical scientific base, the traditions of which were continued in the works of linguists and terminologists of the near abroad [26–33]. It is important to note the schools and approaches existing within the linguistic description, as well as the distinction between the array of lexical units of the language for special purposes — special vocabulary (terms, pre-­terms, quasi-­terms, professionalisms, professional jargon, nomen and prototherms) [34. P. 80–81], and the set of terminological units called the terminology system of the language, which is an ordered structure [32. P. 37–39], which reflects the commonality of a concept, theory or idea [33. P. 107–109]. The heterogeneous composition of lexical units is designated by a number of terms: professionalisms, professional jargonisms, nomena and prototerms. Later, V.M. Leichik introduced the nomination of preterms for designating extended phrases and descriptive turns of phrase temporarily used as terms, and quasiterms for more stable combinations [34].

Materials and Research Methods

The material of the study was regulatory documents and specialized literature on the topic of the study. A continuous sample of units from professional texts and the method of linguistic analysis of the selected units made it possible to identify individual properties of the terminology systems under consideration. The total sample of the studied material consisted of 400 hydraulic engineering terms, 270 terminological units in the sphere of artificial intelligence and 200 terminological units in the sphere of procurement for ensuring state and municipal needs. The functional approach and semantic analysis were used in the analysis; retrospective analysis in analyzing the formation of the terminology systems under consideration; descriptive method in describing the properties of a terminological unit.

Results

The study showed that

1. the terminology systems under consideration demonstrate similarities in the use of terminological combinations for the nomination of new concepts;
2. the specifics of nominating objects in the terminology systems of different branches of activity are motivated by the time of their formation, the degree of influence of foreign languages, primarily English;
3. a separate significant aspect of the formation of the terminology system should be considered the dominance of elements of the functional style in it: scientific or official-­business;
4. extralinguistic factors become an important element in the formation of the terminology system;
5. the terminology system of hydraulic engineering is an old terminology system, the defining characteristics of the system are complexity, polycentricity, diffuseness, preferential use of native language tools compared to borrowings, brevity, motivation and clarity of most units, the accuracy of the meanings of terms reflecting the scientific linguistic picture of the world.
6. the defining characteristic of the system of terms in the field of artificial intelligence is the technical richness of the concept, which contributes to the widespread use of abbreviations and acronyms;
7. the defining characteristic of the system of terms in state and municipal procurement is heterogeneity, which is manifested in the predominance of a combination of lexical units of the modern Russian language, which are used in the function of a term, as well as the presence of translation equivalents from English and translation cliched phrases.

Discussion

Hydrotechnical terms

The features of old terminology systems can be considered using the example of the vocabulary of hydraulic engineering. This area of ​​knowledge is a complex of fundamental and applied disciplines, which, in addition to hydraulic engineering structures, includes hydrology, ecology, geology, shipping, melioration, agriculture, water purification, safety of water management facilities, and hydropower. The complex and interdisciplinary nature of hydraulic engineering has influenced the structure of its terminology system, which unites several equivalent term fields corresponding to the listed sciences. Thus, this terminological formation is characterized by polycentricity [15].

The analysis of Russian terminological units of hydraulic engineering construction as part of the term fields: Hydraulic engineering construction, Hydrology, Geology, Ecology, Shipping, Land reclamation, Agriculture, Water purification, Safety, Recreation, Energy, allowed us to identify the belonging of some lexemes and terminological phrases to several term fields at the same time, which led to the emergence of significant areas of intersection and coincidence. This feature is due to the multifunctionality of hydraulic structures and the interrelation of those areas of human activity in which water plays an important role. In everyday life, terminologists use the term “borrowed terms” for isolated cases of vocabulary repetition. However, when studying hydraulic engineering vocabulary, not individual borrowed terms were discovered, but rather areas of overlap, which led to the conclusion about the diffuseness of the term system [15; 16].

The property of diffuseness manifests itself both within the terminology system — in the presence of areas of interaction between term fields — and externally — in the blurring of boundaries with the general literary language, in the processes of terminologization, de- and reterminologization. As an example, we can cite the term prud ‘pond’, which is found in almost all of the named term fields: poimennyi prud ‘floodplain pond’, ruslovyi prud ‘channel pond’ (term fields: Hydrology and Hydraulic Engineering Structures), biologicheskii prud ‘biological pond’ (term field: Water purification), rybovodnyi prud ‘fish pond’ (term field: Agriculture), пруд-­охладитель ‘cooling pond’ (term field: Power engineering), пруд-­накопитель ‘storage pond’ (term field: Land reclamation), декоративный пруд ‘ornamental pond’ (term field: Recreation) и т.п.

In addition, the word prud ‘pond’ is commonly used and is part of the phraseological unit Prud prudi ‘a dime a dozen.’. A number of names of hydraulic structures: prud ‘pond’, kanal ‘canal’, shlyuz ‘lock’, damba ‘dam’, vodokhranilishche ‘reservoir’, etc. simultaneously belong to the terminology of Shipping.

The terminology of hydraulic engineering has been formed over a long period of time, the term fields were formed in different periods, and this feature of development was the reason for the heterogeneity of the terminology system. Since ancient times, water bodies have been used as sources of water and for transport communication. This fact determined the features of the composition of the term fields Hydrology and Shipping, which contain a number of single-­word non-­derivative terms dating back to ancient Proto-­Slavic roots: reka ‘river’, more ‘sea’, volna volna ‘wave’, bereg ‘bank’, ruslo ‘channel’, dno ‘bottom’, led ‘ice’, etc. These terms are formed lexically, they are a product of the terminologization of proto-­terms and have lexical-­semantic variants in the general literary language, including those with figurative meanings: more tsvetov ‘sea of flowers’ = many flowers, informatsionnaya volna ‘information wave’ = reaction to any event in the media, etc.

The new era was marked by the development of engineering thought and hydraulic engineering, and then scientific melioration and hydropower. By the beginning of the 20th century, the terminology of hydraulic engineering construction was formed in the Russian language, including the names of the elements of the gidrouzel ‘hydroelectric complex’. Despite the borrowing of some devices and technologies: kanal ‘channel’, shlyuz ‘sluice’, risberma ‘apron’, fashina ‘fascine’, etc., there was no oversaturation of the terminology of this industry with foreign vocabulary. Various means of derivation were actively used for term formation, among which one can single out word composition from prefixal verb stems: vodosliv ‘spillway’, zoloshlakoprovod ‘ash and slag pipeline’, ledozashchitnyi ‘ice protection’, etc.

The terminological fields Ecology, Safety and Water Purification can be considered the youngest in the terminological system. In these terminological fields we will highlight international words: Greek words — terms of biology, borrowed by ecology, gidrobionty ‘hydrobionts’, gidrofily ‘hydrophiles’, zoobentos ‘zoobenthos’ and Latin words — terms of water purification flotatsiya ‘flotation’, flokulyatsiya ‘flocculation’, sorbtsiya ‘sorption’, etc. The units of the terminological field Safety are formed mainly by syntactic means of the Russian language. These are terminological phrases with various types of syntactic connection, both subordinate: terms nadezhnost’ gidrotekhnicheskogo sooruzheniya ‘reliability of a hydraulic structure’, etc., and coordinative: pre-­terms predotvrashchenie zatornykh i zazhornykh yavlenii ‘prevention of jams and jam phenomena’, etc.

In general, the terminological units of hydraulic engineering in Russian are characterized by precision: an insignificant number of doublet synonyms and differentiation of the meanings of incomplete synonyms, which sometimes makes it difficult to translate them into other languages. For example, in the names of the phases of the hydrological regime, the semantics of pavodok ‘suddenness flood’ and polovod’e ‘seasonal recurrence (flood) are different. Flooding in Russian science is considered a consequence of a sudden or seasonal rise in water level, but is not considered a term of the hydrological regime. In some languages, for example, in Chinese or English, there is only one equivalent for all three terms. Thus, the scientific linguistic picture of the world is reflected in the Russian hydraulic engineering vocabulary.

The average length of a term in the terminology system being described is less than two words, which, as has been established, is characteristic of the language of technical sciences or the scientific style of speech [34]. An exception is the term field Security, where the average length of a term is more than three words, which is more characteristic of the official business style of speech.

Terminological Units of the Field of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence as part of research in the field of computer science began to form its own system of terms in the languages of the world in the 1960s; in the Russian language, this process has been actively developing since the early 2020s due to the increased automation of production processes, the integration of artificial intelligence systems into all spheres of human life, including healthcare, education and leisure. The versatility of the areas of implementation of artificial intelligence, its cognitive support for mathematical optimization, formal logic, natural language processing, statistics, psychology, etc., as well as its connection with computer science as a whole form the intersection of lists of terms from various fields of activity.

Part of the terminological system of the sphere of artificial intelligence is formed by morphological means — adding affixes to roots — primarily to create a noun that names a process or result: GPT (Generative Pre-­trained Transformer) — gypification in the meaning of ‘digital optimization of processes using GPT technologies’.

For the terminology system under consideration, a large percentage of terms are noted that are not lexicographic and represent a pre-­term. An example is the lexical unit giperpersonalizatsiya ‘hyperpersonalization’, which denotes a concept that differs from standard personalization in the use of artificial intelligence technologies in real time to improve personalized marketing strategies. This concept provides the user with adapted content, personalized recommendations, products or services. Note that this unit is not yet recorded in Russian-­language dictionaries and lacks a standard form: there are various spelling options, such as hyper-­personalization (with a hyphen, similar to the English version Hyper-­Personalization) or giper-­personalizatsiya, as well as multi-­syllabic formulations, for example, giperpersonalizatsiya II ‘AI hyperpersonalization’, giperpersonalizatsiya na osnove II ‘AI-based hyperpersonalization ‘and giperpersonalizatsiya s ispol’zovaniem II ‘AI-using hyperpersonalization’.

In the course of the analize, the lexical elements were divided into terms, pre-­terms and terminological combinations and analyzed by the level of terminologization and by form. It was revealed that the main share in the array under consideration is made up of terms (more than half), which emphasizes the specialized nature of the vocabulary used. Terminological combinations make up approximately 30 % (intellektual’nye interfeisy ‘intelligent interfaces’), pre-­terms less than 20 % (doverie algoritmu ‘trust in the algorithm’). This result indicates a high specificity of the terminology and its predominantly scientific nature. As a result of the classification by form, the majority — about 60 % (intellektual’nyi lichnyi pomoshchnik ‘intelligent personal assistant’) — refers to phrases that consist of two (oblachnye vychisleniya ‘cloud computing’) or more words (adaptivnaya set’ na osnove sistemy nechetkogo vyvoda ‘adaptive network based on a fuzzy inference system’).

Interestingly, there is a predominance of abbreviations of about 25 % (OLAP / operativnaya analiticheskaya obrabotka ‘Online Analytical Processing’) over the use of individual words of less than 15 % (lemmatizatsiya ‘lemmatization’) in the dataset under consideration. We believe that this is due to the fact that AI concepts are complex and technically rich, which encourages the widespread use of abbreviations and acronyms. This phenomenon can be interpreted as a characteristic feature

Terminological units of state and municipal procurement

The sphere of state and municipal procurement has been functioning for a long time, decrees of Russian tsars on the organization of deliveries to the court are known (for example, “Decree on the collection of money for the supply and contract of marine provisions”, 1721), however, terminological design began during the period of changing economic and political conditions in the mid-90s of the 20th century. In 1992–1997, the first legislative acts were adopted, in 1999, the fundamental federal law was issued, which was assessed as a comprehensive effort to regulate and systematize the system of state procurement in Russia.

The terminology system of state and municipal procurement is characterized as recently formed and is at the stage of structuring the composition of lexemes. We have noted the functioning of a significant volume of single-­word-terminologized units of the general literary language (dopusk ‘admission’, zakupka ‘purchase’, zakazchik ‘customer’), among which a separate group consists of words using the plural form to express terminological meaning (torgi ‘trades’, uslugi ‘services’, nuzhdy ‘needs’, raboty ‘work’);

• borrowings (ploshchadka ‘platform (about trades)’, bank ‘bank’, dokument ‘document’, konkurs ‘competition’, monitoring ‘monitoring’). For this group, it is important to note that the borrowing of these lexical units did not take place with the purpose of replenishing the terminology of state and municipal purchases, but within the framework of the general literary language (konkurs ‘competition’) or others, for example, the economic terminology (bank) or technical sciences (monitoring);
• terms included from other terminology systems (grant, audit — financial sphere; kontrakt ‘contract’ — legal sphere, etc.).

In the sphere of state and municipal procurement, some phrases of the general literary language are terminologized: okazanie uslug ‘provision of services’, podacha zayavki ‘submission of an application’; predostavlenie dokumentatsii ‘provision of documentation’; provedenie konkursa ‘holding a competition’, postavka tovara ‘delivery of goods’, etc. Phrases can be classified into:

• terms — pairs of a noun + an adjective (agreement relationship), in which the expansion of a noun by an adjective transfers the given phrase into the category of terminological units: pomoshch’ ‘aid’ — gumanitarnaya pomoshch’ ‘humanitarian aid’, ploshchadka ‘platform’ — elektronnaya ploshchadka ‘electronic platform’;
• terms — pairs of verb + noun: okazat’ uslugu ‘to render a service’, vypolnit’ raboty to perform work’, which also have a variant with a verbal noun: okazanie uslugi ‘rendering a servic’e and vypolnenie raboty ‘performing work’;
• terms — pairs of verbal noun + noun: dopusk tovarov ‘admission of goods’, zakupka tovarov ‘purchase of goods’, which do not have a pair with a verb.

More complex constructions, which are combinations of 3 or more parts, are understood by us as pre-­terms, and consist of three (narushenie zhizneobespecheniya grazhdan ‘violation of life support of citizens’), four (ispolnenie obyazatel’stv storonami kontrakta ‘fulfillment of obligations by the parties to the contract’), five or more parts (poryadok podgotovki obosnovaniya nevozmozhnosti vypolneniya kontrakta ‘the procedure for preparing a justification for the impossibility of fulfilling the contract’). The most frequent terminological combinations are two-, three- and four-­component models.

These extended models should be considered as terminological units, namely pre-­terms, since they serve to designate concepts in the sphere of provision of state or municipal needs; the functioning of such models is explained by the dominance of elements of the official business functional style in the terminology system of state and municipal purchases; terminological phrases are organized by mandatory valence, that is, in this function they represent single terminological complexes; the described area does not have other terminological units for naming the corresponding concepts; the maximum length of terminological units in the sphere of purchases for provision of state or municipal needs is limited to seven mandatory components; with optional components, the number of words in a terminological name may be greater. For example, in the five-­component model, optional distributors with a coordinating connection are used, the valence of which is optional: obyazatel’stva postavshchika (ispolnitelya) po sozdaniyu, (modernizatsii), osvoeniyu proizvodstva tovara ‘obligations of the supplier (contractor) to create’, (modernize), master the production of goods’. The examples given show that in this area the most common way of naming concepts is through terminological phrases — pre-­terms.

Thus, for the sphere of procurement for ensuring state or municipal needs, pre-­term names are typical, which are chains of names. They differ from terms by the absence of brevity, but other features of terms are inherent to them: accuracy, regularity, reference to a certain sphere, stylistic neutrality. The criterion that allows us to single out pre-­term phrases as independent units is the presence of a mandatory connection or valence, uniting pre-­terms into integral structures.

Conclusions

The study showed that the terminology systems under consideration demonstrate similarities in the use of terminological combinations for the nomination of new concepts. The specifics of nominating objects in the terminology systems of different industries are motivated by the time of their formation, the degree of influence of foreign languages, primarily English; extralinguistic factors become an important element in the formation of the terminology system;

The terminology system of hydraulic engineering is an old terminology system, the defining characteristic of the system is its complexity, polycentricity, diffuseness, the predominant use of native language tools compared to borrowings, brevity, motivation and clarity of most units, the accuracy of the meanings of terms reflecting the scientific linguistic picture of the world.

A feature of the terminology system of the procurement sphere for meeting state and municipal needs is its relative heterogeneity, which is manifested in the predominance of translation equivalents from English and translated cliched phrases, on the one hand, and a large number of vocabulary of the modern Russian language, which is used in the function of the term.

The defining characteristic of the system of terms in the field of artificial intelligence is its relative heterogeneity, which is manifested in the predominance of translated equivalents from English and translated cliched phrases, on the one hand, and a large number of vocabulary from the modern Russian language, which is used in the function of the term.

About the authors

Inna I. Galankina

Russian State Agrarian University - Moscow Timiryazev Agricultural Academy

Author for correspondence.
Email: galankina@rgau-msha.ru
ORCID iD: 0000-0003-2702-0581
SPIN-code: 1362-1820
Scopus Author ID: 57296940100
ResearcherId: ABG-8095-2021

PhD in Philology, Senior Lecturer of the Department of Russian as a Foreign Language and General Theoretical Subjects

49, Timiryazevskaya str., Moscow, Russian Federation, 127434

Mostafa F.A.T. Nour

RUDN University

Email: 1042235191@pfur.ru

PhD student, assistant at the General and Russian Linguistics Department, Faculty of Philology

6, Miklukho-Maklaya Str., Moscow, Russian Federation, 117198

Alexey K. Perfiliev

RUDN University

Email: 1142221165@pfur.ru
PhD student, assistant at the General and Russian Linguistics Department, Faculty of Philology 6, Miklukho-Maklaya Str., Moscow, Russian Federation, 117198

References