LEXICO-SEMANTIC, SYNTACTIC AND STATISTICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE WORD ‘FLOW’ IN TEXT CORPORA OF SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL DISCOURSE

Abstract

This article examines the semantic structure of the English noun ‘flow’ as it appears in texts referred to scientific and technical discourse. The availability of real texts allows for the “language-speech” dichotomy to be realized. The material used are the text corpora from three technical disciplines: “Automation of Thermal Power Processes”, “Chemical Engineering”, and “Acoustics”. The texts from the first two disciplines primarily describe production processes, while the third, “Acoustics”, focuses on communication means. Thus, it is clear that although the texts embody specialized areas of scientific and technical discourse, their thematic concepts (as well as terminology) are entirely different. Under these unequal conditions, the lexical-semantic, syntactic, and statistical properties of the word ‘flow’ are determined. The total volume of the text corpora amounted to 600,000 tokens, a sufficiently representative figure for the study of speech phenomena. Webster’s normative dictionary is used as the language system capturing the semantic structure of the word ‘flow’. A thorough contextual analysis is used to identify lexical and semantic variants of meanings. These lexical and semantic variants are then compared to the meanings of definitions in the normative dictionary, determining whether they coincide or differ. To describe the syntactic features of the word ‘flow’, contextual analysis is also used to distinguish the basic models in which this word functions, they are eight. The results of the study show that the word ‘flow’ in the texts of the three specialties embodies, although not all, but the main meanings recorded in the normative dictionary definitions. The results also demonstrate that all meanings can be attributed to the general scientific lexical layer. Syntactic characteristics are determined using statistical methods for counting the occurrence of the word ‘flow’ in each of the syntactic models. Of the eight syntactic models found in the texts “Automation of Thermal Power Processes” and “Chemical Engineering” specialties, the word ‘flow’ appears in all models, although the frequency is lower in the “Chemical Engineering” texts. In the acoustics texts it appears in only four of the eight models