STRUCTURAL PECULIARITIES OF RAILWAY TERM FORMATION IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Abstract

The structural peculiarities of the railway term formation is investigated in the article. It is demonstrated that the most common ways of the one component railway term formation are suffixation and prefixation. The prefixation-suffixation type is a less productive way of the word building. Compound words proved to form a large group of the railway terms. The relations among the components of a compound word represent a specific type of semantic and structural relations of the word in a word combination, where the terms which consist of «noun+noun», «adjective+noun» predominate. In the system of the English railway terminology among the component terms the most widespread are nouns that explains that nouns define processes, equipment, devices, and objects. This paper outlines some linguistic properties of technical terms. The article focuses on some linguistic features of a term. Being a linguistic object with the common and specific features of a language system a term has all lexical-semantic and formal features of the words and word combinations of a natural language. In the process of the affixation term building the semantics of a derived word is defined by an affix that is why an affix can bear a particular word building meaning. But having definite motivational relations between a derivative and a derived word the semantics of the derived word is not always determined by the meanings of its components. Deciding the semantics of a derived term many factors should be taken into consideration: conversion, the peculiarities of a compound word, polysemy etc. It should be underlined that morphological or affixation type of the term forming is based on the principles of word building of the literary language.