Applicability of the thesaurus approach to modelling the lexical-semantic structure of a terminological field

This article is the first part of the research focused on the applicability of the thesaurus approach as one of the instruments for building a lexical-semantic model of terminological fields belonging to various subject areas. Among other issues the article points out that the way of researching linguistic facts has changed from their analysis and description to modelling. After reviewing a number of scientific works by various linguists, the author proves the applicability of the thesaurus approach to a corpus of scientific lexis for its proper description, particularly for revealing the most characteristic types of semantic relations for every given terminological field. The applicability of the thesaurus approach is also proved in terms of the current stage of IT development. From this prospective, the potential of the thesaurus approach is determined in terms of analysis and structuring large amounts of text information for further automatic processing. With all this being said, the author, however, draws the conclusion that the complete formalization of a natural language lexis is essentially impossible.