Polysemy in Linguistic Terminological Systems Based on the Analysis of French Linguistic Terms

Abstract

The article reports on the features of polysemy in French terminological systems of linguistics at inter-system and intra-system levels. The existing studies concerning terminological semantics allow pointing out two aspects of the term structure: a semantic structure representing a complex of meanings, and a structure of the terminological meaning representing a complex of semes. The first aspect supposes the analysis of terminological polysemy regarded as a negative characteristic of terms. According to the second aspect some particularities of denotative and significative levels and their correlation to scientific concepts can be analyzed. In the given study the component analysis of the definitions of French terms – such as ‘sémantème’, ‘mot’ and ‘signe’ – reveals different types of polysemy and terminological variation. The analysis of semantic structures of these terms shows that terminological deviations are caused by objective differences at significative and denotative levels of the meaning as well as by the subjective use of occasional contexts of terms in linguistic research. The suggested results allow constructing a new classification of meaning relations of linguistic terms. Each type of relations is correlated to different elements of the term structure. The hierarchy of these elements is embodied into an abstract model that can be applied for the analysis of any term of the modern linguistic terminology.