LEXICAL FEATURES OF NOUN PREFIX MORPHEMES (ON THE MATERIAL OF THE ENGLISH TECHNICAL DISCOURSE FIELDS “CHEMICAL ENGINEERING”, “AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING”, “ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING”)

Abstract

The article presents an attempt to describe the prefix morphemes attached to noun stems in terms of their lexical characteristics which allow them to be attributed to different stratification layers: common, general scientific and terminological ones. The material for the study are the text corpora of the English technical fields “Chemical Engineering”, “Automobile Industry”, “Electrical Engineering”, based on the articles from scientific journals corresponding to these specialties and published in the United Kingdom and the USA. А list of prefix morphemes (and their semantic characteristics) was created using morpheme classifications known in the linguistic literature, the morpheme-by-morpheme correspondence method, as well as the method of contextual analysis. Then all the prefixes were distributed about stratification layers. The procedure of distinguishing stratification layers is not particularly difficult with the units of common layer because they are used in everyday life and are understandable to all members of society, as well as the units of terminological layer that can easily be determined by experts in the technical fields of chemical engineering, automotive and electrical engineering. But for identification of the prefixes of general scientific layer the several methods have been applied. Except for semantics of prefixes their statistical features are described – frequency of usage and productivity. The number of prefixes is 29. The largest group of prefixes is formed by the lexemes-terms – 15 prefixes, total frequency of use – 1 563 units. As a whole there is the interdependence of the frequency and productivity in this layer. The second place in the number of prefixes is occupied by the general scientific layer – 7 units. However, total frequency of using lexemes with these prefix morphemes is significantly higher than the terms – 2 209, i.e. almost one and a half times more. The interdependence of the frequency of use and productivity in this layer is very clear. The third place is occupied by the units of common layer – 3 prefixes, total frequency – 1 006. In this layer, a strictly inversely proportional interdependence of frequency of usage and productivity is observed. A lexeme group is selected that can function not in one but in several stratification layers, they are only four but their total frequency is 2 699 morphemes.