АНАЛИЗ ЯЗЫКОВОГО КОМПОНЕНТА НОМИНАТИВНЫХ ЕДИНИЦ СЕМАНТИЧЕСКОГО ПОЛЯ «РАБОТА ДОРОЖНО-ПАТРУЛЬНОЙ СЛУЖБЫ»

Introduction

For the a traffic inspector of the Road Patrol Service “it is of utmost importance to be able to effectively participate in professional communication, which entails mastery of the basic notions and terminology of the professional sphere, an ability to adequately perceive the information coming from the road traffic participants and to plainly express communicative intentions” [2, P. 121]. “One of the effective means of forming a professional linguistic personality of a traffic police inspector, modeling institutional discourse patterns and developing intercultural professional business communication skills is to teach English for special purposes” [1, P. 6]. With this perspective in mind, we carried out linguistic analysis of the nominative units within the semantic field “Road Patrol Service” with the view of establishing the key nomination mechanisms manifesting themselves in the reference zone and the features of the discourse type which are represented at the lexical level. The term “language component” is used restrictively. It encompasses the lexical component relating to the reference zone “Road Patrol Service”, it also includes the syntactic structures, but only at the level of complex nominative units. When analyzing the language component of the nominative units of the semantic field “Road Patrol Service”, we, on the one hand, aimed at establishing correspondences in terms of language expression, and, on the other hand, we noted non-standard cases which for one reason or another were included in the studied semantic field.

Methods

The key methods employed in the study are semantic analysis, nomination analysis, and word formation analysis. When collating the lexical content of the field, we worked with materials related to professional legal discourse functioning in the administrative and legal sphere of activity of the traffic police. Thus, the nominative units are not analyzed without their reference to the sphere in which they are used. So, discourse analysis in reference to the lexical component of the professional communication in the sphere of Road Service Patrol is also employed.

Results

The analysis was carried out with reference to the road rules of different states in the USA. All of the documents are samples of an official business style. The main features of this style are invariably reflected in its lexical component. This, in particular, concerns semantic clarity, extreme accuracy of expression, objectivity, standardization, stability and laconicism already at the level of complex nominative units. The linguistic features of the administrative-clerical substyle dominant in the reference zone under study include special terminology, a large number of verbal nouns and cases of the use of gerund in the English language, as well as the use of nouns that name people according to their actions and social roles.

Let us look at the listed features in their language embodiment.

Examples of terminological units are the following nominative units: RFID (Radio Frequency ID); right-of-way rule; carpool / high-occupancy vehicles (HOV) lanes.

The following lexemes, often forming complex nominatives, name people by the type of their activity and their social roles in a traffic accident situation: a highway patrolman; a highway lawbreaker; a traffic violator; a crash victim / a subject to a traffic offence; an injured party; a search witness; an arrest witness.

Verbal nouns in the semantic field under analysis ​​include the following nominatives: a traffic offence; an interview; a traffic collision. The analysis of the form of English nominatives allows us to conclude that the conversion mechanism is used: interview, when a word from a verb becomes a noun, entering a new morphological paradigm; or sometimes when it is contingent with spelling changes, as in the case of the word offence, the verb correlate of which looks like offense; or using derivational affixes: to collide → collision.

In the English language, a special group in this regard is represented by verbal nouns that are homonymous with the gerund when it comes to the form (grammar homonymy): braking; overtaking; joyriding; hijacking; driving under influence.

Cases of the use of gerund as applied to the nominative units that form the semantic field “Road Patrol Service” are quite frequent, on this basis we attribute them to typical lexical ways of speech expression in the studied reference zone: taking a witness statement; tagging a car; giving traffic tickets / parking tickets.

Following the developed system for identifying and analyzing the nomination mechanisms, we distinguished “two large groups: mechanisms of primary (direct) nomination, which lead to a change in the significative component of lexical meaning, as well as mechanisms of secondary nomination based on the concept of semantic transposition associated with a change in semantic structure the words” [3, P.170-172], [4, P. 193-194,], [5, P. 142-143], [6, P. 46].

Among the mechanisms of the primary (direct) nomination, the specification of significative meaning of the word by means of an additional lexical unit or lexical units forming a complex nominative unit has the most frequent manifestation. The structure of a complex nominative unit can be variable. The most common option is represented by adding descriptive attributes to the defined word, which may be expressed by different parts of speech: a habitual traffic offender; provision of dashboard camera footage.

The second option involves word formation, for instance, as in rear-end collision; a head-on collision; a side-collision; a run-off-road collision; a single-vehicle collision; a multiple-vehicle collision. All the examples illustrate the same model of specifying significative meaning of a lexical unit by introducing a compound word. Here, word formation affects the nomination. Moreover, the word formation models in the above examples differ. On the one hand, an additional word from the point of view of semantics can form a complex nominative unit with a main word, i.e. when the basic way of word formation is compounding: a side-collision. On the other hand, we can isolate complex words consisting of two parts: a rear-end collision, a single-vehicle collision, a multiple-vehicle collision. Each component in such integrated nominations is capable of independent functioning. They are united only by being related to a specific situation in the reference zone. The third version of composite word formation is represented by a combination of a word and a preposition or a postposition. In this case, either a phrasal verb or a prepositional nominal phrase is used in a composite nominative structure to clarify the indicative value of the lexical unit: a run-off-road collision; a head-on collision. In all the given examples, nomination can be considered propositional, since behind each nominative unit there is a proposition, which can be easily restored to its full form.

In addition to pure compounding, the specification of significative meaning is realized through complex derivatives, that is, those complex nominatives in which two words are combined with the subsequent affixation. The examples are a goodscarrying vehicle; a load-carrying vehicle.

In regulatory legal documents, additional lexical units are very often introduced by compound conjunctions, copulative and alternative conjunctions in the first place: fatigued or drowsy driving; renewal by Mail or Internet; replacing a Lost/Stolen or Damaged Driver License; traffic lights and road markings; horn, headlights, and emergency signals; global positioning system and digital maps; to deal with aggressive drivers and road rage.

As part of the secondary nomination, the following mechanisms were identified:

I. Semantic transposition, including

● metonymy, understood as transfer of the meaning from a process to the result of this process: suspension; revocation; traffic management; traffic regulation; recovery of penalty for an administrative offence; carriageway marking; braking; signaling; steering.

The given examples allow further subdivision into two groups depending on the formal criterion. The first group is formed by nominative units formed by affixation as a word-formation method: to suspend → suspension; to revoke → revocation; to manage → management; to recover → recovery. The second group is the names of processes and actions (nouns of propositional semantics) formed using affixes, but also undergoing conversion, that is, functioning with the dominance of the properties of the name: braking; steering; signaling;

● metaphor understood as transfer of the meaning according to the similarity of signs: blind spots; cone zones. Let us turn to the analysis of the examples. “The blind spot of the car” is the space around the car that the driver cannot see from his seat. Such a spot is at the rear side and may even be in front of the car. The spot, understood as space, cannot be blind, that is, devoid of vision, since vision is one of human senses. Accordingly, we have a sensory transfer, although the peculiarity of this example is the correlation of metaphor and metonymy: a metaphor is based on a situation of a lack of ability to perceive the world through vision, and metonymy in which this inability is transferred to a space that cannot be seen due to the driver’s position. The “cone zones” example is a pure metaphor based on similarity in form: cone is denotatively related to the shape of road cones as a means of temporarily marking a section of a road;

● narrowing of the meaning, which is manifested, for example, in the “freighters” lexeme, which is not associated with a cargo aircraft, not with a cargo vessel, but with a truck among other carriers; as well as in the following cases: a roadkill; driving under influence; lights and horns.

II. Semantic-syntactic transposition, including

● conversion that affects all lexical units with the meaning of an event, action or activity that are expressed in English through nominative units with a gerund or a verbal noun in their composition, which, when translated into Russian, undergo semantic-grammatical transformation, acquiring categorical semantics of a noun,  for example, jamming on the brakes; changing lanes; driving in reverse; drink driving.

Conclusion

The analysis allowed us to pinpoint dominant nomination mechanisms manifesting themselves in the nominative units of the semantic field “Road Traffic Patrol Service”. Among the mechanisms of direct nomination we highlighted the specification of significative meaning of the nominative unit due to the introduction of additional descriptive lexical units. Among the mechanisms of secondary, or indirect, nomination, we distinguished semantic transposition, including metonymy, metaphor and narrowing of the meaning, as well as semantic-syntactic transposition, represented by the conversion mechanism. The results of the analysis bear value in terms of practical purposes of teaching road traffic inspectors to communicate with foreign participants on the road. The glossary worked out for the research includes lexical items from different situations on the road. The fact that these lexical items are organized on the functional role principle allows to learn them with reference to a particular situation and its participants. The language specificities pointed out in the research allow students to understand the mechanisms of nomination used in the lexical items of the analyzed semantic field better and be able to identify the nomination vehicle in each case. In its turn, it facilitates the comparison with the lexical analogues in the mother tongue thus helping to avoid mistakes.