STRUCTURAL AND NOMINATIVE FACTORS TO DETERMINE THE MEANING OF MEDICAL TERMS IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH

Abstract

The article raises the issue of structural and semantic features of the term origin in modern English medical discourse. Characteristics of such a plan include a description of the internal form of units of medical terminology, their etymology and morphological structure which are supported by the human cognitive activity in the nominative act. In view of the inner form of the units under analysis, it appears that many names for the medical phenomena were coined on the basis of people’s names or surnames, functional needs, qualitative characteristics, body parts and other features. The most productive ways of term formation in contemporary English are morphological, syntactic and word formation. Considering the etymological roots of the medical terms, units with Latin roots refer to a part of the human body and sometimes to the names of the pathologies. Terms founded on the Greek root signify a pathology or a disease. In English medical terminology there dominate words with Greek word-forming elements, many of them are included in the nomenclature of medical Latin, but they can be traced to the Greek language. Prefixes and suffixes in the morphological pattern of medical terms play an important role in revealing their meaning. The most popular type of word combinations in English terminology is a two-component attributive phrase containing a nuclear element, mostly a noun in the nominative case and an attributive, defining element. On the whole, the meaning of medical terms is determined by the extralinguistic information reflected in the inner form of the lexemes and also by their structural peculiarities such as the origin and the semantic content of the constituent elements such as roots, affixes, words in compound clusters. The semantic method of term formation presupposes the transition of terms from other sciences, borrowing terms from other languages, terminologizing, metaphorical and metonymic transference.