Ways of Vocabulary Enlargementin the English Sublanguage of Physics

Abstract

Improvements and changes in all the fields of today's world civilization lead to making new discoveries, developing new technologies and products that have a great impact on the human mind, contribute to development of languages which reflect all the new phenomena and serve for fixing and transferring the just appeared knowledge. As a result, there appear so-called specialized vocabulary (terms) in all the fields of science, particularly in such physics fields as medical physics, physics of perspective materials, distributed intellectual systems, quantum devices and radio photonics, and others, the central part of which being terminology. Some part of the vocabulary contributes to enlarging of common language lexical units' number as well. Emergence of such a large number of vocabularies requires their being regulated and ordered as there appear many versions of their writing and necessity of defining common scientific principles of their formation. The relevance of all the ideas mentioned above defines the purpose of the article, which is to consider the ways of forming professional lexical units in different fields of physics from the point of view of their structure and semantics and their influence on the increase of common language vocabulary. The article outlines the opportunities of how to define the ways of word forming as well as its models in multi-field physics. The leading approaches to the study are methods of structural, contextual, word forming analysis, descriptive method, comparison and generalization of word forming ways in multi-field physics, models of these ways, the development of criteria for determining the direction of derivation and the corresponding methodology for analyzing word-formation relationships for substantivation. The results of the research conducted can be used in higher school practice of English lexicology courses, as well as in making dictionaries on language for special purposes in multi-physics fields. The results also showed a sharp increase of special terms the number of which even exceeds the common vocabulary number due to two main ways: substantivation and conversion. Considered is compounding and eponym terms' contribution to enlargement of physics fields' vocabulary as well.