ACADEMIC CONCEPTS ORGANIZATION IN SEMANTIC NETWORKS AND ITS REFLECTION IN SOME STRUCTURAL BLOCKS OF DEFINITIONS

Maxim Latu
 Assoc. Prof. Ph.D., Pyatigorsk State University, Russia, Laatuu@yandex.ru

Abstract
In contemporary world scientific and professional knowledge expands at a very quick pace and new concepts must be properly defined. The existence of a definition aimed at a professional is considered to be a requirement for a technical term and its important distinguishing feature (see Lotte 1961, Superanskaya 1989, Leychik 2009, etc.), consequently, the study of the general principles of definition construction plays an important role in the systematization of terminological apparatus, the formation and development of knowledge expressed by various terminologies. However, definitions of technical terms sometimes appear to be incomplete, differ in structure and semantics for one and the same concept. This paper is devoted to the study of reflection of academic concepts systemic organization in certain structural blocks of their definitions. We claim that the definition can structurally be subdivided into prototypic blocks according to different pieces of information that outline the defining features of an academic concept. Our approach applies the principles of semantic network analysis to the terminology system modelling (see Malkovskiy 2012, Latu 2016, etc.). In such a terminological network the vertices are represented by technical terms while the arcs are semantic relations of certain types that link conceptually and systematically adjacent technical terms. In the course of analysis of the systemic organization of technical terms that appear in the considered definitions we defined the prototypic structural blocks based on the semantic relations between the adjacent technical terms. Thus, it sheds light on what technical terms are used in certain structural blocks to define other technical terms in the process of definition construction and what the choice of this specialized vocabulary units depends upon. The examples are mainly drawn from the actively developing terminologies of nanotechnology and space research as well as other terminologies when necessary. The corpora of technical terms and their definitions were extracted from specialized dictionaries and fragments of texts in specialized literature. It is also discussed that the choice of structural blocks that appear in definitions is to some extent predetermined by the category of the defined concept.

Keywords: academic concept, definition, technical term, semantic network, semantic relation, information