Terminological collocations in medical Latin and English: a comparative study

Abstract

Background. The present paper examines the linguistic status of terminological collocations in medical Latin and English, discusses the most productive term-formation models and ways of Latin-English translation. Aim. The authors aim to provide the comparative analysis of Latin and English terminological collocations and suggest their classification in terms of the idiomaticity level and semantic valency. Materials and methods. The research is based on the corpus of terminological collocations in Latin and English medical discourse using structural, etymological, typological, comparative methods, as well as the method of semantic analysis and conceptual metaphor theory. Results. The research has resulted in the delineation of the following groups of terminological collocations in medical Latin and English: (1) terminological collocations with lower degree of idiomaticity — analytical units whose semantics correlates with the amount of free meanings of the components; (2) terminological collocations with semantic cohesion of the components due to metaphorical nature of the terminological element with active / passive valency; (3) clinical idioms — terminological collocations with higher degree of idiomaticity. Within the latter group, we suggest to discern eponymic, toponymic, zoomorphic, botanic and mythonimic subtypes of terminological collocations. Conclusions. A promising area of future research is the development of bilingual explanatory dictionaries with Latin and English equivalents of terminological collocations, as well as the information about the semantics of their components.