СПОСОБЫ ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ ТЕРМИНОВ В СОВРЕМЕННОМ АНГЛИЙСКОМ ЯЗЫКЕ ДЕЛОВОГО ОБЩЕНИЯ

Morphological way of term formation is the crucial method aimed at the creation of new words by means of affixation, conversion, contamination, truncation, and abbreviation.

Affixation involves adding suffixes and prefixes to a word for creating a different form of that word or a new word with a different meaning (Yakovleva, 1998).

The most frequently used suffixes for creation of new words are the following:

-tion- (‘administration’, ‘devaluation’, ‘competition’, ‘quotation’, ‘promotion’);

-ing- (‘marketing’, ‘factoring’, ‘advertising’, ‘leasing’, ‘consulting’, ‘holding’);

-er- (‘barter’, ‘manager’, ‘promoter’, ‘copy writer’);

-or- (‘auditor’, ‘distributor’, ‘investor’).

In English language business discourse, prefixation is also observed in the process of term formation, i.e. the prefix de- (‘decentralization’, ‘depopulation’); dis- (‘disintegration’); re- (‘recession’); un- (‘unemployment’).

The next word-building model is conversion (lat. ‘conversio’ - transformation) which means the formation of a new word by transferring its base into another paradigm of a word change. For example, the formation of a verb from the base of a noun is a common way for the English language due to its analytical structure. From researchers’ point of view, this method is considered the most productive way of word formation. For example, the verb is transformed into a noun: ‘to check’ - ‘a check’; ‘to test’ – ‘a test’. The transformation of an adjective into a noun: ‘international’ - the International’; ‘professional’ – ‘a professional’. One of the latest trends in the formation of business terminology in the English language is the emergence of nouns from phrasal verbs (Brians, 2013). For example, ‘to lay off’ means to reduce, ‘lay off’ - reduction; ‘intake’, (consumption), ‘upturn’ (growth, improvement), ‘output’ (production, release), ‘pay-out’ (payment).

Another derivational model is contamination (lat. ‘contaminatio’ - displacement), or crossing, which is understood as the interaction of linguistic units interfacing with an associative meaning, that leads to their semantic or formal change or to the formation of a new linguistic unit, i.e.  the words ‘sea’ + ‘laboratory’ = ‘sea-lab’.

Among the word-building models of English business terminology, there is also truncation or apocope — the formation of new words by clipping of one or more unstressed sounds at the end of a word. For example, ‘agrobased interprise’ is reduced to ‘agro’, ‘information’ – ‘info’ (Danilenko, 1976).

The next widespread morphological way of term formation in the English language business discourse is abbreviation. Abbreviation is a word made up of shortened initial elements (morphemes) of a word combination. In English terminology, the most common abbreviations are alphabetic or initial ones. For example, the English term ‘payment on delivery’ has the abbreviated form ‘POD’. The term ‘AIDA’ is decoded as ‘attention, interest, desire, action’ (the model of consumer behavior describing the sequence of events leading to making a decision whether it is worth to shop or not). Abbreviations should not be mixed up with nomenclature units that are not terms (for example, ‘FTSE’ - Financial Times Stock Exchange).

In Figure 1, it is possible to see the frequency of morphological term formation models’ usage.

Figure 1. Morphological Term Formation

Conclusion

As a result, it was revealed that the usage of terms plays an essential role in business discourse that is why the negotiator has to be aware of peculiarities of their formation. Hence, three main methods of business term formation are semantic, syntactic, and morphological. The studied research helps to determine that most commonly used models of term creation are affixation and conversion. Thus, it is crucial to take into account the morphological and syntactic features of the language and utilize the gained knowledge while using business terms since they can ultimately affect the course and quality of business cooperation.