Information on the thesis

The relevance of research topic is conditioned by the need to develop the theory of comparative terminology studies within systematic and structural approach to the analysis of terms pertaining to closely and distantly related languages, that shall ultimately foster the formation of theoretical basis for comparative lexicography and the compilation of educational sociolinguistic translation dictionary. The aim of the thesis is to identify the structural features of mono- and multicomponent sociolinguistic terms and to clarify their semantics based on systematic and structural approach to the analysis of terminological systems of the Ukrainian, Polish and English languages in a comparative context.

The thesis consists of an introduction, three chapters, conclusions, list of references (including 307 units of professional literature and 147 units of sources). The text of the thesis includes six histograms illustrating the obtained results, in particular the allocation of terminological fields “language situation”, “language policy” and “political communication”.

The introduction rationalizes the choice and the relevance of research topic and formulates the aims and the tasks, as well as the object, the subject and the novelty of the thesis. Additionally, it states the factual material and the methods, expands upon theoretical and practical significance of the results and provides the data on testing the main provisions of the study. Finally, it outlines thesis structure and scope. The first chapter is devoted to comparative analysis of terms in different linguistic traditions. It has been for the first time in terminology studies that stage-by-stage method of terminological fields modeling has been offered. The above method is based on general theoretical principles of comparing languages, theoretical results of researching lexical and semantic systems of different languages, categories and concepts of terminology studies and methods of comparative studies of terms structure and semantics. The second chapter is related to the comparative research of structural and word-forming features of sociolinguistic terms. The analysis of morphemic structure of mono-component terms has been performed. In the third section the component analysis of sociolinguistic terms dictionary definitions contributed to revealing their divergent and convergent semantic features, that allowed to distinguish – through the application of elaborated method – such terminological fields as “language situation”, “language policy” and “political communication” in each language. The composition of terminological fields units (procedure of step-by-step identification) and their structural ordering in accordance with invariant principle nuclear – near-nuclear zone – periphery has been defined. Three sections of “English-Polish-Ukrainian Educational Dictionary of Sociolinguistic Terms” have been compiled.

Key words: comparative terminology studies, structural model, terminological field, semantic group, dominant term, semantic features, full correspondence, partial correspondence, terminological lacuna.