ENGLISH MEDICAL TERMINOLOGY: FUNCTIONAL ASPECT

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of English medical terminology, namely – its functional aspect. Terminology plays a significant role in people's professional communication, as it serves as a source of obtaining, transmitting scientific information and as a tool for mastering the specialty. Terminology is part of the scientific apparatus, which makes it possible to learn the laws of the research process, to identify channels of interaction with other elements of a particular field of science. At the present stage, one of the main tasks of linguistics is the stratification of the vocabulary of a particular language by various parameters, in particular, by the scope of use of a particular lexical unit. The material of this study were terms and terminological phrases that denote the main medical concepts, selected by a method of selection from scientific articles relating to various subject areas of medicine, dictionaries, Internet sites dedicated to medicine. The studied material is considered by us from the standpoint of system-functional approach, which involves the study of language in general and the language of scientific style of presentation in particular as a complex formation, which highlights the components and relationships between them. The ways of forming new terms can be divided into the following groups: 1. morphological way of word formation – derivation, abbreviation; 2. syntactic, through the formation of phrases and phrases from several words; 3. semantic – narrowing of the meaning of commonly used words; metaphorical and metonymic transfer of the former meaning; 4. borrowing words from other languages. The most productive way to form medical terms is derivation. The research conducted on the basis of English medical terminology is the first stage of the study of the relationship between cognitive structures of consciousness and semantics of the term, between the worldview of the English speaker (medical specialist) and the structure of general and specialized dictionaries and texts.