Thematic classification of English abbreviations for control in language teaching and its organization

Abstract

The article suggests a system of thematic subgroups (TSG) of English abbreviations within the thematic group (TG) ‘Control, tests and exams in language teaching’. Based on similar research into the Ukrainian specialized terms thematic classification, the authors justify the relevance of their study by the lack of sufficient research on English abbreviations and the need to work out their thematic typology. The purpose of the article is to develop the said TSG system, and the tasks involve the selection of terminological corpus, its analysis, outlining conclusions and prospects. theoretical background. The English terminology system is based on certain conceptual features, which allow integrating its components into certain TGs, viewed as the term clusters, having some common denotative features. The distribution of terms among TGs is believed to be essential for the development of terminological systems. The research corpus includes 101 abbreviations selected from the original relevant-domain English-language sources. Findings. Abbreviations-related TSGs within the said TG have varying degrees of complexity (which is the highest one within such TSGs as ‘Tests and the relevant notions’ – 42%, ‘Certificates’ – 32%, ‘Diplomas’– 19%), quantitative composition, structural type, parts of speech their full forms belong to, as well as the term formation models. The number of components in the analyzed abbreviations ranges from two to nine. However, the overwhelming majority of them comprise three to five elements. As far as the term-building models are concerned, acronyms prevail, though some combined models occur as well, such as apocope-related ones. Conclusions and prospects of further research. The common conceptual features of all TPGs provide for their thematic integrity, logic and clarity. The number of components of the constituents within the analyzed TG has a wider range as compared to other TGs. The term-building models, their structural characteristics and the translation techniques to render the analyzed abbreviations into other languages require additional study, which constitutes the prospect of further research.