Oksana Chuyeshkova

Ukrainian Engineering and Pedagogics Academy

Formation of gender linguistics term system

© Chuyeshkova O. V., 2016

In the article the gender linguistics term system is considered. Some of the problems in the terminology formation, including difficulties in identifying its composition, the presence of a significant number of synonyms and variations, differences regarding definitions and spelling of certain terms are outlined. It’s emphasized that the analyzed term system while in its infancy requires a comprehensive study, normalization and standardization.

Keywords: Ukrainian language, gender linguistics term system, terminology normalization, gender, synonyms, variance.

The article analyzes the gender linguistics term system. It is a new linguistic direction, whose appearance was caused by the intensification of gender studies during recent decades in the global and domestic linguistics. Today gender approaches are developing in almost all fields of humanities and social sciences studies. The analysis of the language and speech structure can provide information about the role of gender in one or another culture, which behavioral norms for men and women are recorded in the various types of texts, how the idea of gender norms is changing, what style features can be attributed predominantly to the female or men, how maleness and femaleness are recognized in different languages and cultures, how gender affiliation affects language acquisition, which fragments of the language picture of the world it is connected.

Linguists who work in this field examine the general problems of the theory of gender linguistics, the question of the feminine and masculine vocabulary, word creative expression corresponding gender-marked values, lexical and grammatical category of gender, masculine and feminine discourse, communicative aspects of gender linguistics, expression of gender in modeling speech genres, gender strategy and tactics of communication and so on. The consideration of these and many other issues is impossible without normalization of the terminological apparatus.

There is almost no research of the terminology system of gender linguistics in scientific literature. In a few studies the gender linguistics is considered as an independent direction of linguistics that organizes, classifies and outlines the prospects of the development of this area of expertise, but the term system that serves it is still unsteady. The article aims is to describe the current state of gender linguistics term system and to analyze some problems of formation of terminology in terms of specific examples.

The most essential problem is the terminology detection, since terms involved in mainstreaming of gender linguistic studies are included in the metalanguage and other gender-oriented sciences. The ground of the analysis was based on methodological and procedural aspect, which consists of the most comprehensive texts processing, in which gender linguistic terminology is used. All of the analyzed terms are extracted from documents and manuals for educational institutions, scientific papers. For the qualification of one or another category as terminological the priority ones were nominative and definitive function and systematicity.

Also it is emphasized that there is no consensus among scientists about neither as for naming certain concepts of gender linguistics, nor for identifying these concepts. This trend is a characteristic of the period of any science formation, but it does not promote normalization and systematization of its term system. Gender linguistics term system contains a number of terms-synonyms and at that the synonymous rows may contain from two to 13 components. It is noted that the synonyms in the terminology are undesirable. This semantic process can be justified in two cases.

First, it's an early stage of term system formation where the presence of several titles of scientific concepts will allow choosing eventually the most appropriate language tools that meet regulatory requirements, which in its turn will promote term system development in general. Secondly, it is the presence of specific correspondences of borrowed terms that will be the impetus for the creation of its own terminology. The stage of any terminology formation allows, except synonyms, variance as the possibility to choose the most rational way of expressing scientific concepts. But in general variant term units complicate the use of terminology because they contain no new information.

It is traced that in science literature there is no single definition of analyzed area of knowledge and term system. In this paper gender linguistics is proposed to consider as a linguistic direction, representatives and representatives of which investigate gender aspects of language and speech using linguistic conceptual apparatus. Accordingly, a term system of gender linguistics is a correlated with this knowledge area set of terms, interconnected on the conceptual, lexical-semantic, derivational and grammatical levels. The attention is paid to some spelling issues.

The proposed exploration outlines only a few problems in the development of gender linguistics term system. Further work in this area will contribute to its normalization and standardization.

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