A Study Of Semi-technical Words In Technical English From The Perspective Of Glosseme Theory

On the basis of consolidating the domestic and the foreign scholars’ studies, thisthesis finds that the concept of semi-technical words has not yet been given a completeresearch report, such as the definition, its lexical features and the category of its usage. Tothis end, the thesis adopted the quantitative and qualitative analysis research methodscombining with the collected corpus so as to give the working definition to semi-technicalwords, and then to examine two aspects of semi-technical words from the perspective ofthe semantics and its glosseme analysis：First, the thesis is going to give a defined classification of its linguistic characteristicsfor semi-technical words；Second, the thesis is going to analyze the characteristics of its semantic changesthrough the collected statistics instances of semi-technical words, and concentrating on itsvocabulary quantitative and qualitative analysis.The entire corpus in this research is mainly collected from the English and ChineseTechnology Dictionary compiled by the Tsinghua University compilation group. Thisthesis adopted the quantitative and qualitative analysis research methods to process therelated semi-technical words. As for the research procedure, the author reads the previousliteratures and filtered the related data in the dictionary manually. Finally, this thesis isgoing to take the collected504words for quantitative and qualitative analysis and to givethe conclusion by combining with the original classification annotation in the dictionary.Eventually, the research gives us such major findings, as follows:First, semi-technical words refer to the one kind of words that is not only widely usedin the daily English communication with general meaning(s), but also represents certainpure scientific and technical meaning(s). The core meaning of words remains the same,but in specific disciplines and fields of expertise there may still exist a precise technicalmeaning.Second, the language features specificly display on two aspects:(1) high frequencyof occurrence in scientific articles;(2) highlighting polysemy characteristic.Third, the semantics suggests that social factors and psychological factors are the external factors for the change of the technical words, while the linguistic factors and theexpansion of the words shows as its internal factors（Hu2006:170）. The theoretic basiscombines with the semantics theory, its glosseme analysis and the collected semi-technicalwords in the dictionary. This thesis finds that it’s the extension, the transferring and theassociated analogy of glosseme eventually leads to the diversifying characteristics of suchwords with the guidance of the similarity and relativity in the associated glosseme theory.At last, in addition to the change of the internal language mechanism, we also cannotignore that the factors for its change of meanings. For certain, it is also triggered by theobjective material world, the language is regarded as a mirror of society (Hu2006:170).The language mainly reflects on human progress in science and technology, all of thesethings deeply expands people’s understanding of the world. Facing so many newlyemerging concept and knowledge, it is natural to pass an opinion that the originallinguistic category of words could be out of reach. To accurately and reasonablely describethe existing scientific and technological perception, this thesis also contributes to theunderstanding of a large number of semi-technical words.