Characteristics of Scientific and Technical Texts in the Engineering Field of Modern English

Abstract

The article is aimed at studying the features of engineering terminology in scientific and technical texts in the field of Electrical Engineering. The relevance of the research is determined by the growing popularity of engineering discourse due to the continuous development of engineering technologies and international collaboration. The result of this process is the constantly updated composition of engineering terms in the modern English language, requiring detailed study and comprehension. The main method for studying lexical units in the present article is thematic analysis of terminology related to Electrical Engineering. This method gives the possibility to discover the peculiarities of the definite research area and distinguish common features of researched contexts. The main sources of the article are scientific and technical texts in English that are defined as original materials combining characteristics of scientific and technical functional styles (coherence, structural properties, integrity, modality, and functional and semantic style). The documentary method of data collection was used to analyze the regular documentation: patents, instructions, standards, articles, reference materials. Such documentation is of interest to a limited circle of people, has an average volume, a conventional structure, and a system of links and output data. According to the findings of the research, these texts possess definite characteristics: stylistic, compositional, structural, grammatical-syntactic and lexical features. The results of the research are supposed to be useful to apply for linguists, teachers and students who can be related to the technical terminology in Electrical Engineering. KeywordsScientific and technical textsEngineering terminologySemantic featuresLexical featuresLexical and semantic analysis