Canadian-Russian LSP dictionary of environmental law: Definition of a term within the framework of a contrastive study

The article presents the results of a broader study, devoted to the construction of the microstructure of the bilingual LSP dictionary of the Canadian environmental law. The aim of the article is to describe the process of a term definition within the given subject field. The authors propose two principles to follow. First, a close relationship between such properties of a term as term definition and term motivation is taken into consideration. The second principle is based on a two-stage comparison of terms: the intralingual comparison of the English terms of the Canadian environmental law and the interlingual comparison of the Canadian and Russian terms of environmental law. To design the algorithm for constructing terminological definitions, the authors adhere to two major approaches in terminology: traditional and socio-cognitive. For the purpose of designing the definitions of terms of the Canadian environmental law, the study adopts a typology of terms on the semantic basis, which is developed by socio-cognitive terminologists. The typology distinguishes three categories of terms: “collective categories”, “activities” and “entities”. The authors suggest that the terms of the first and second categories should be described by methods of socio-cognitive terminology through the allocation of the “core definition” and relevant “modules of information”. Definitions of terms of the third category are constructed in compliance with the methods of the traditional approach in terminology through the selection of the closest genus and species differences or through enumeration of all components of the concept. Terms of this category are divided into four groups according to the level of term motivation: fully motivated, partially motivated, false-motivated and unmotivated terms. The article reveals the need to identify two areas in the definitions of fully motivated and unmotivated terms. These are the areas of brief scientific definition and of encyclopedic information. The purpose of the area of brief scientific definition is to explain the minimum amount of information about the term to low-competent students, while the area of encyclopedic information serves to broaden the professional horizon of high-competent students. The intralingual comparison of the terms of the Canadian and Russian environmental laws is of a significant importance for the bilingual LSP dictionary. The aim of the intralingual comparison is to compare and describe the linguistic and sociocultural differences in the meanings of the terms of the two terminology systems. The contrastive terminology study reveals the presence of the following types of the LSP equivalents: full equivalents, partial equivalents and non-equivalent terminology. The authors propose to code the term equivalency with special lexicographical labels.

Keywords

Authors

References