Linguistic term ‘term’ revisited

Abstract

The article provides a brief overview of the ‘term’ concept in the Slavic and Germanic languages, in Ukrainian and English, in particular, with a special focus on legal terminology in the specified languages. Contract law, international treaties in public law are under close analysis of domestic and international scholars. However, the concept of ‘term’, its definition in linguistics remains ambiguous in treatment and has not gained unanimity among the academia. With each scientific approach, each new study and established approaches, methods and techniques for the term, such are generally supplemented by certain features that allow the assertion of the introduced scientific novelty in the author's research. Therefore, the present article aims to acquaint researchers with one of the latest approaches to the definition of the term in linguistics, reverting to the classification of terms in languages for specific purposes, according to the term structure as proposed by Oksana Chaika. The novelty of such an approach is the vision for synchronization of scientific tools applicable by linguists, computer science experts and software engineers in the fields of language systems and communication. Next, two substitutes for the term are considered when dealing with terminologies, or languages for specific purposes. They are a monomial and a polynomial. A monomial stands for a one-word term as well as two-word and multi-word terms. Given the complex natures of terms in a particular terminology, their syntactic relations, etc., a monomial provides a broader view to the term from a morphological, syntactical, and functional standings. Of much more complicated nature are terms in terminologies, which are bound in a term cluster by coordination and the order in such a term string is firmly fixed. Moreover, it is irreversible. That enables researchers and distinguished scholars see some deeper undiscovered syntactic relations of such terms proposed to be called polynomials as a highly demanding research trend in the linguistic domain.