PREFIXATION IN TERMINOLOGY: EVIDENCE FROM MEDICAL, TECHNICAL AND ECONOMIC TERMS

• Narzullayeva Muborak Sherzod qizi

  Gulistan State University, Gulistan, Uzbekistan

  Author

This article examines prefixation as a term-formation device and asks whether it behaves differently inside specialised vocabularies than it does in general language. Three domains supply the data: medicine, engineering and economics. The prefixes attested in each domain are inventoried, classified by origin and by function, and compared across the three fields. Three findings emerge. First, terminological prefixation is dominated by oppositional pairs — hyper- and hypo-, macro- and micro-, over- and under-, brady- and tachy- — which are rare in general vocabulary but serve the terminological requirement that a system of concepts be reflected in a system of designations. Second, the domains differ systematically in the resources they draw on: medicine relies on bound Greek and Latin formatives, engineering on quantitative and relational prefixes including the standardised SI series, and economics on process prefixes such as de-, re- and dis- that encode the direction of a change of state. Third, the category-preserving character of prefixation, usually treated as a peculiarity of the process, turns out to be its principal advantage in terminology: because the prefix leaves the head intact, a prefixed term maps directly onto the genus-differentia structure of a terminological definition. The article closes with the consequences of these findings for the standardisation of specialised vocabulary and for the treatment of borrowed prefixed terms in Uzbek, where such terms are normally adopted whole rather than calqued.

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