SOME PRODUCTIVE SCHEMES OF ACADEMIC CONCEPTS RELATIONS

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

Abstract

Technical terms are one of the paramount features of the academic discourse and the language of science in general. Academic concepts of a particular domain are interrelated and form its system of knowledge. It is a well-known fact that the systemacy of technical terms reflects the specificity of academic concepts organization that they represent (see Superanskaya, 1989, Leychik, 2006, etc.). New concepts are constructed and integrated into the system based on the already existing knowledge. Understanding the principles of knowledge organization seems to be of great importance for further research and development in the field and may also contribute to certain applied objectives such as the construction of electronic dictionaries, data bases, expert systems, etc. One of the key problems here is to define the adjacent concepts that may belong to one and the same category or different categories and be linked by semantic relations of various types.
This paper is devoted to the study of some productive schemes or patterns of academic concepts organization. Each terminology can be represented as a terminological network where technical terms are vertices and the systemic relations between them are arcs. The types of vertices correlate with the categories of academic concepts that the technical terms express. In a terminological semantic network a concept is linked to a limited number of adjacent concepts by different semantic relations. The analysis demonstrates that the concepts of a certain category are likely to establish semantic relations of certain type with concepts of definite other categories. Consequently, two categories linked by a semantic relation of a certain type form a scheme. The research has demonstrated that a number of them appear to be quite frequent while others are not so regular. Thus, some of such productive patterns are defined and their specificity is discussed. The examples of the interlinked technical terms forming the schemes are mainly taken from the terminologies of nanotechnology and space research. The body of technical terms and their definitions were obtained from terminological dictionaries and data bases as well as fragments of specialized texts.

Keywords: academic concept, definition, technical term, semantic network, semantic relation, scheme, category