Nanoworld and Megaworld in the Mirror of Language
Nanoworld and Megaworld in the Mirror of Language

Summary/Abstract: Today, new technologies keep extending the borders of the world we perceive with our sense organs giving us a chance to look behind the veil and study the phenomena of the nanoworld and megaworld that we cannot see with the naked eye. Every step the humanity takes further into these new worlds enlarges our understanding of reality and is inevitably reflected in the language creating, as D. Crystal (2007) put it, new wordworlds. The research focuses on the peculiarities of perception of new phenomena in the domains of nanotechnology and space research and the reflection of this cognition process in the language. Special attention is devoted to the principles and tendencies in new technical terms coining and how the familiar reality influences the conception of the constituents of these two worlds. Thus, some technical terms are a result of associative thinking when the brain searches for similarities between the new phenomena and the elements of the well-known reality sometimes forming new or following the already established patterns. As the principles of terminological network analysis are applied to shed light on the organization of knowledge within the domains, the paper also discusses the peculiarities of reflection of systemic relations in the structure of technical terms when the adjacent technical terms are used as terminological elements and definitions. Some productive semantic relations that are represented in the structure of a certain number of multi-component terms that consist of two or more elements (AKO – “a kind of” semantic relation being the most productive) are considered.

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