ON THE ISSUE OF SYNONYMY OF SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL TERMINOLOGY

Abstract

The article touches upon the issue of synonymy of scientific and technical terminology, the focus being on linguistic approaches to interpreting the nature of this phenomenon and on the synonyms encountered in the English- language terminology system of the energy industry. In terms of terminology standartisation, synonymy is viewed as undesirable; still, numerous linguistic studies indicate that synonyms can be found in different terminology systems.As terms are essentially words of the general language, it can be argued that they have features of commonly used words, and therefore they can enter into synonymous relations. However, since the essential feature of a term is its unambiguity, any terminological unit tends to be accurate, so that each special concept is named by only one term. As new terminological units of similar meaning are created to denote objects and concepts of science and technology more accurately, one can trace outdated names that are used along with the new ones. In addition, the synonyms are proposed to distinguish by their structure, origin and usability features. The subject of the present study is the English-language terminology of energy industry, and the object is the type of synonyms used in contemporary energy industry discourse, the synonymous terms used to denote overvoltage being analysed in detail. The study of modern lexicographical sources has shown that the majority of synonyms used in the energy industry are variants of British and American English, due to the US playing today an important role on the energy market, or they represent the full and abbreviated forms of the term. Analyzing English terms used to denote overvoltage has revealed that the semantic aspect of synonyms should be investigated by using a wide range of authentic materials, including reference online and print sources, and corpus tools.