Study of the syntagmatic aspect of the notion "term" from the positions of semiotic theory

The article views the issue of collocational combinability of ELT (English Language Teaching) terminology from the positions of linguistic semiotics. The author of the article has picked out lexical collocations formed by the same lexical units from «general purposes» and «general academic» English, and from the context of English for specific purposes (specialist texts on ELT topics). On the basis of their comparative analysis, the author drives at a conclusion that recurrent «professionally marked» lexical combinations of a unit in a specialist text may serve as another criterion for admitting the unit's terminological status and may be considered as an important part of the «linguistic code» shared by professionals. In this connection the author puts forward her definition of the notion «term», which reflects the above mentioned suggestion.