MODELS OF SYNTACTIC AND LEXICAL COMPATIBILITY OF LEXICAL-SEMANTIC VARIANTS OF THE NOUN “UNIT” IN SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL DISCOURSE TEXTS (THE TECHNICAL AREA “AUTOMATION OF HEAT AND POWER PROCESSES”)

Abstract

The article deals with the issue of implementation of the models of lexical and syntactic compatibility in which lexical-semantic variants of the noun “unit” are actually embodied during its functioning in the analyzed texts. (The analysis of realization of the semantic structure of the noun “unit” in texts was presented in the previous study published earlier). The following characteristics of the compatibility models were determined: the percentage of different models in the implementation of LSVs of the noun “unit” in AHPP texts; parts of speech with which the unit noun is combined when syntactic compatibility is implemented; thematic groups of parts of speech, combined with the noun “unit” in the formation of lexical compatibility. As a material the text corpus of the field “Automation of Heat and Power Processes” (AHPP) referred to scientific and technical discourse was used. The noun “unit” belongs to a high-frequency zone of the created probabilistic and statistical model (frequency vocabulary) of specialty AHPP since the absolute frequency of occurrence of “unit” is 670 tokens. The analysis demonstrates that from all definitions of the noun “unit” fixed in the normative Webster’s dictionary in the AHPP text corpus only the first two definitions were used with rather high frequency – LSV1 (46.5% of all occurrences of this word found in the AHPP text corpus) and LSV2 (18.3% of all occurrences of this word in the AHPP text corpus). Other seven definitions were used in texts incidentally, very seldom. The analysis of syntactic compatibility shows that the total of models of compatibility of the noun “unit” makes up 5 units in both LSVs. The most frequent models of compatibility turned out to be: LSV1 in AN model (36.1% of all models used with this meaning) and NN (23.3% of all models with LSV1); in LSV2 also the AN models (46.4% of all LSV2 models) and NN (13.0% of the total of LSV2 models). The results of the study of lexical compatibility show that the noun “unit” both in LSV1 and LSV2 has quite broad combinative possibilities.