Features of the phenomenon of polysemy and homonymy in the corpus of metaphorical terms in the English professional language of geology

Abstract

Modern technical terminology, evolving in proportion to the advancement of science and technology, serves as a means of expressing, preserving, and transmitting specialized technical concepts, thus ensuring effective communication among experts. The rapid exploration of the Earth necessitates the intensive development of terminology in the field of geology, which defines the need of the study of terms in this domain. This article attempts to investigate paradigmatic relationships in the corpus of metaphorical terms in the English specialized language of geology. The metaphorical term is interpreted as a term formed through metaphorical transfer of a name from one object to another, from one sphere to another, based on the associative similarity, with all the structural and semantic characteristics of a common term. Research methods are based on the use of general scientific methods of analysis, synthesis, deduction, induction, descriptive methods, as well as the methods of componential, definitional, distributive, and semantic analyses. The material consists of a multitude of metaphorical terms, selected through the method of continuous sampling from the contemporary English geological terminological dictionaries. The comprehensive analysis has revealed that lexical and semantic processes of polysemy and homonymy are characteristic of the corpus of metaphorical terms in the English specialized language of geology. The comprehensive analysis of these terms showed that both intra-systemic and inter-systemic polysemy is characteristics for the metaphorical terms under study. We have identified polysemic metaphorical terms having two, three, four, or more meanings. Particular attention is paid to the topic of homonymy. The paper describes and analyzes two primary types of homonymous terms: intra-branch and inter-branch. The research findings affirm that metaphorical terms in the field of geological science can be homonymous within the scope of geology and simultaneously polysemic in relation to other terminological systems. The analysis conducted revealed that this geological terminology includes metaphorical terms that can be polysemic within this scientific field and homonymous regarding the other terminologies.