Lexical And Semantic Features Of English Financial Terms

With the rapid development of national economy and China's entrance to the World TradeOrganization, China's financial industry faces the opportunities and challenges brought byopening its markets to foreign financial institutions. Accordingly, people are showing greatenthusiasm for learning finance in English. To meet the social demand, some universities andtraining schools offer the course English for Finance or Finance in English. Linguists andteachers have begun their research on English for finance course design and the languagevariant itself. However, up to now the study in this field is at its initial stage, and scholarshave not reached a consensus on what English for finance is. In this thesis, the definition ofEnglish for finance is overlooked because the subject matter is English financial terms.The thesis aims to generalize the lexical and semantic features of English financial terms byanalyzing the word formation processes, meaning change and etymological roots of Englishfinancial terms, in the hope of improving teaching and learning English financial terms.Through scientific and strict method and procedure, the author selects 562 entries from anauthoritative English finance dictionary as the research sample. By analyzing the wordformation processes of the sample terms one by one and comparing the frequency distributionof each word formation process in English financial terms and that in English for generalpurposes, the features of English financial terms word formation process is generalized andthe causes are provided. Moreover, a detailed description of the meaning change andetymological roots of the English financial terms are provided, thus eliciting the associationsand differences between English financial terms and English for general purposes. Theconcluding part points out the limitations of the research and hopefully its implications onteaching and learning.