English Career Terms Synonymy

Abstract

Synonymy is a linguistic phenomenon which reflects the complexity of reality representation in a linguistic worldview. Terminological synonymy poses certain difficulties for specialists who perform practical tasks in application areas such as translation and education. Career development, career advancement, career growth, career progression, career progress, career enhancement are among the most frequently used terms with similar semantics which indicates a certain degree of indefiniteness in the terminology in the correspondent professional field. The aim of this paper is to conduct comparative linguistic analysis of these terms. The material is presented by research article titles from eight scientific databases. Methods include quantitative and qualitative study of frequency, semantic fields by semantically related concepts, keywords, syntagmatic collocability and componential analysis. The results show that career development can be currently considered a hyperonym as it is the most frequent and time-proved term with the widest semantic coverage and indication to professional spheres in the dictionaries. Despite its obvious prevalence, career advancement , career progression, career growth and career progress are gaining momentum as alternative terms highlighting a lack of important semantic nuances in career development. Though the general number of career advancement and career progression across research papers is considerably lower, their presence in article titles is almost the same as that of career development. Title is arguably the most demonstrative part of a research paper; therefore, it can be presumed that the career terms might acquire lexical meanings which will clearly differentiate vertical career growth from horizontal organizational movement.

Keywords

• synonymy
• hyperonym
• career
• term
• research article
• componential analysis
• semantic field
• syntactic collocability