Investigating the terminological system of professional communication on the basis of content analysis

The article presents a stage-by-stage working-out of a content-analytical study of scientific articles, thesis abstracts and legal documents to investigate the terminological field of professional communication in order to clarify the content of the term “professional communication” and identify its structure. It gives a theoretical argumentation to use the method at the ascertaining stage in the context of the problem of training future masters for professional communication in the scientific community. It explains the choice of the material and corpus of language data to be studied. The analyzed linguistic units of the text are defined by choosing a conceptual variable (professional communication) and its values (categories, structural components and qualities of the participant). The article describes the procedure of contextual content analysis, additionally applied to check if the choice of the linguistic units relating to professional communication under study is complete. Furthermore, it presents how the search for relevant texts and terms was made, and the dependence of the terms among themselves was also considered. The author makes the conclusion about the limits of applicability of the content analysis method to the study of the terminological field of the investigated problem, the value of the data obtained and the extent of using these data for further research.