FUNCTIONAL SPECIFICITY OF THE ENGLISH SHIPBUILDING TERMINOLOGY

Abstract

The article is focused on the study of the English terminology in the sphere of shipbuilding, being the part of the marine vocabulary. The paper points out that formation of this terminological system was primarily conditioned by the presence of merchant and military fleet in Britain and was later accelerated by the development of active trade and economic relations leading to import-export exchange of strategic goods to the countries around the world. The authors give their definition of the notion “marine terminology”, which comprises industries of maritime affairs (shipbuilding, ship repair, electromechanical equipment, related computer technologies, port networking) as well as marine terms themselves denoting concepts and phenomena of the sphere (e.g., names of ships and vessels, special units of measurement and marine standards, port and coastline facilities, maritime law). It was found out that the shipbuilding terminology has a narrower specificity and is related to the industrial sector, namely: mechanical engineering, metallurgy, engineering. From the standpoint of semantic and structural properties, the terms are singled out into motivated composites, semi-motivated composites, and unmotivated composites. It was found out that their structure comprises two, three, four and five components, the terms denoting ship objects (e.g., parts of the ship’s hull, elements of the ship, ship structure, ship design and its testing) being of the highest productivity. The analysis has also revealed a high frequency of abbreviations employed in the system of shipbuilding terminology primarily used for language economy and lapidary expression of the idea. The registered types of abbreviations include complex shortened abbreviations; complex abbreviations with shortened initial elements of the original word combination; initial abbreviations, predominantly being two- and three-component acronyms). It is concluded that the shipbuilding lexical system reflects the development of the shipbuilding industry and serves to perform an important communicative function among the specialists in this field.