APPLICATION OF VALENCY THEORY TO THE TERM FORMATION PROCESS (BASED ON A TERM SYSTEM ‘NAMES OF BUILDING MATERIALS’)

Abstract

In the modern linguistics, a limited amount of studies is devoted to “terminological valency”, however, this linguistic phenomenon needs thorough examination since it allows showing the process of appearance of new terms with certain accuracy, which makes this research topical. According to the leading linguists’ research, the valency is one of the most important structural characteristics of lexical units, as it captures the entire distribution of this unit and its consistency with other units. Valency is based on the laws of semantic agreement and units collocation due to the presence of common components in their meaning (L. Novikov, M. Stepanova and others). The relevance of our research is conditioned by the necessity to analyze the principles of structure, semantics and functioning of the language units of professional terminology. Term is the key component among these units. Building materials terminology system in the Ukrainian language at the beginning of the XXI century is the main focus of the article. The purpose of our research is to analyze the nomination means of the construction industry special concepts. The nominals of building materials are examined, and the features reflected in their structures are analyzed. It is also examined how the correlation of the reality objects influences the combinability of terms which these materials name. In this research the term “valency” is used as a synonym of the term “combinability”. A valency analysis is applied to analyze how the terms are created. As it is known, there are the following types of valency: semantic, lexical and syntactic. The article examines the semantic and syntactic valency of terms in order to determine the corpus and properties of potential connections of terms and conditions of these connections fulfillment. The valency of the complex term is conditioned on a number of reasons: belonging of the term to one or another part of speech, the morphological structure of the term and its belonging to this or that topic group within a certain term system. The valency analysis of suffix and complex derivative nominals of building materials has allowed to reveal the character of their semantic valency and to define the mechanisms of their formation.