THE SPECIFICS OF THE BRITISH AND AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION TERMINOLOGICAL UNITS FUNCTIONING

. Nowadays two opposite tendencies are typical of education – unification of terminology and preservation of terminological units with the cultural component of meaning. Since English remains one of the crucial means of cross-cultural communication in general and in the education field in particular, it is of great importance to study the specifics of usage of the English language terminological units in the given realm within the context of the tendencies mentioned. The paper studies the functioning peculiarities of terminological units included in the British and American higher education terminological systems. Special focus is given to the theory of the cultural component of meaning detected in the course of the lexical-semantic analysis of the humanities terminological units is developed in the present paper. The theory is extrapolated to the British and American higher education terminology. The author analyses terminological units with the cultural component of meaning identified by means of territorial markers in terminography or containing the references to the British and American higher education systems in their definitions. The given paper draws on the findings made in the course of analysis of the corpus containing approximately 3000 terminological units belonging to the British and US higher education terminological systems. In line with the classification of terminological units with the cultural component of meaning according to the lexical-semantic criterion, the author gives examples of variance and uniqueness of terminological units by the material of various local higher education terminological systems. In conclusion the author determines the peculiarities of functioning of the British and American higher education terms. The functioning similarities and differences between the British and American higher education terminological systems are considered. The author determines four levels (from the level of a particular university terminological system to the level of a national terminological system) of the British higher education terminological units functioning and two levels of the US higher education terminological units functioning. It is demonstrated that terminological units with the cultural component of meaning are more typical of the British higher education terminological systems (25% out of 1500 terminological units analysed) than of the US higher terminological systems (16% out of 1500 terminological units analysed). The findings made in the given paper contribute to developing cross-cultural communication competence.