SEMANTIC AND STRUCTURAL DESIGNATION OF CAUSATIVE AGENTS NAMES’ OF INFECTIOUS DISEASES IN HUMAN

Abstract

Humanity is annually faced with new previously unexplored infections that cause infectious diseases. The processes of cognition are constantly accelerating, new structures of knowledge are revealed, verbalized in terms of new fragments of reality. The issues of studying the terminology of various fields of medicine for identifying new perspectives of cognition of objects and phenomena, their description, understanding and explanation remain topical.

The purpose of the article is to carry out cognitive and onomasiological analysis of semantic and structural types of some infectious agents names’ which reveal the role of nomination as a structure of knowledge about what is indicated on the basis of Latin and English.

Such research methods as sampling method, descriptive method, cognitive and onomasiological analysis, comparative, structural and sociolinguistic methods were used in the following article.

Results. The names of infectious causative agents in the onomasiological structure of terminological units represent fixed reflection of the knowledge structures about the infection of the human body, thus preserving the human social and cognitive experience, accumulated in the evolution of medical knowledge. Intra- and extralinguistic factors serve as the motivational basis for the nomination. The names of infectious agents are embodied mainly in simple and complex onomasiological structures: in the name of causative agents of human diseases, the onomasiological basis indicates the class to which the infectious agent belongs, and the onomasiological feature specifies the basic component, expands the information content of the terminological concept. The variability of the methods of formation of structural models of the term depends on the degree of knowledge of the object at a certain stage of its research. The feature selection depends on the semantics of the knowledge structure components of the denoted object or phenomenon. Eight semantic types illuminate the specificity of terminological names for denoting causative agents of human infectious diseases.

Conclusions. The onomasiological basis is presented in four structural models. The most productive in English and Latin are twocomponent models. English onomasiological structures are semantically more voluminous, and pragmatically they are functionally variable. The basis of the onomasiological structure is supplemented by various features that specify, clarify, expand the meaning of the term or indicate the differences of the specified subject, which belongs to a number of similar classes of concepts.