ANALYSIS OF NOUN COMPOUNDS IN CIVIL ENGINEERING FROM A TECHNICAL POINT OF VIEW

The study is based on a specialized corpus of 1116 English nominal compounds of the structure noun + noun from the field of civil engineering that are analyzed from a technical point of view. Analyzed terminology is created by combining different words. Nominal compounds of the structure noun + noun have shown to be the most numerous. The corpus was collected from professional and scientific journals from the field of civil engineering. Each compound was assigned a compressed definition and a semantic category from a technical point of view. The novelty of research is the categorization and analysis of metaphorical and/ or metonymic compounds. The study aims to show that they are also transparent, i.e., that it is possible to uncover their motivation with the use of metaphor and metonymy. These creative nominal compounds use the processes of metaphorization and metonymyzation to a greater extent. The analysis has generated 23 categories of nominal compounds, which overall resulted in 66 semantic subcategories. These types of nominal compounds highlight the importance of some aspects of technical messages in the civil engineering knowledge domain. Metaphorical terminology highlights the interaction of encyclopedic and specialized knowledge since new technical terms are conceptualized and named using already existing notions from the general English language.