Terminological density of definitions

The article is devoted to the analysis of the peculiarities of academic knowledge representation in definitions of technical terms that are aimed at scholars by means of vocabulary units that belong to different strata. The research focuses on the terminologies that belong to different subject areas among which are sciences and humanities. These include nanotechnology, information technology, space research, ecology, mediation and political studies. The definitions were extracted from various specialized dictionaries both published in paper and electronic as well as state standards of technical terms of the fields of knowledge under consideration. The definitions were structured, analyzed and compared. The article discusses what elements of academic knowledge within the scope of definition are expressed by specialized language units that are technical terms in majority and the units of general vocabulary. Technical terms that are extracted may refer to the same field of knowledge as the defined technical term, to the adjacent fields of knowledge or to the group of interdisciplinary technical terms. Some factors that influence the structural features of definitions particularly length and the lexical composition are considered. Among these are the type of definition (definition aimed at a specialist in specialized dictionaries and definition aimed at a non-professional in dictionaries of general use), the subjectivity of word choice and the description of the concept of a lexicographer. The quantity of technical terms in the structure of definitions was studied. The most frequent and common figures were determined. Special attention is paid to the category of the defined concepts. The definitions that express different concepts were analyzed separately and compared. The general tendency of correlation between the overall number of words in a definition and a number of technical terms in its structure was defined. The specificity of the systemic character of the technical terms used in the structure of one and the same definition is described. The terminological density that is a value that shows correlation between specialized and non-specialized language units in definitions was determined and studied. Special attention in this respect is paid to the fact that a large number of technical terms are actually multi-component technical terms consisting of more than one word (terminological elements) that are their structural components. This factor influences the terminological density as more words refer to the specialized language units. The statistics that reveals the most frequent and common cases of terminological density in definitions is studied and the averaged values for the analyzed fields of knowledge are compared. The peculiarities of general vocabulary use are described. The reasons that stand behind the word choice of such lexis are considered. It is argued that some units of general vocabulary appear to be very productive in construction of definitions of technical terms.