Lexical morphology – a method of technical term scientific investigation

Abstract

The present study deals with attempts to elucidate some peculiarities of technical terms formation through lexical morphology, a way to investigate lexical units through morphemes, often defined as the smallest linguistic units with grammatical function. The morphematic dissociation of the terms in morphemes combinations highlights their syntactic and semantic properties. Affixoids, prefixes and suffixes are found in the composition of English-derived technical terms, possessing the motivating feature of telecommunication field terms. The essence of morphematic analysis consists in term segmentation in a succession of larger or smaller themes, structurally correlated with each other, a criterion which we will consider primarily while determining the constitutive morphemes of the term structure. The motivation of terms can also be based on a metaphorical transfer, the analogy with familiar realities is used in this case, the metaphor becomes a process of transforming common words into terms through terminological process.