REALIZATION OF THE SEMANTIC STRUCTURE OF THE NOUN ‘WAY’ IN THE TEXTS OF SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL DISCOURSE

The presented article examines the extent of realization of the semantic structure of the English noun 'way', encountered in text corpora of various technical specialties.In our article, three corpora of this type are investigated: "Automation of heat and power processes", "Chemical engineering" and "Acoustics".The total volume of tokens amounts to 600 thousand units, which allows us to speak about a fairly high representativeness of the obtained results.The corpora were compiled on the basis of scientific articles on the relevant topics taken from scientific journals in the UK and the USA: for the texts in specialty "Automation of heat and power processes" Power, Power Engineering, Process Engineering; for the corpus "Chemical engineering" -Chemical Engineering Progress, Chemical and Process Engineering; for the corpus "Acoustics" -Journal of Acoustic Society of America, Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, Applied Acoustics, IEEE Transactions of Antennae and Propagation, Journal of the Society of America.The methods that were used to get the data were the following: contextual analysis to select the necessary linguistic units; comparative analysis to identify the relationship between the dictionary entry of the word 'way' and its functioning in the text corpora; statistical method for calculating the frequency of tokens in the studied texts, as well as for the further calculation of shares of this or that meaning in the total volume of realization of semantic structure, etc.The material for the analysis was: 1) definitions of the dictionary entry for the noun 'way', recorded in the Webster's Standard Dictionary; 2) lexical facts determining the functioning of this word in the text corpora of the three engineering specialties indicated above.By comparing these two linguistic resources, the goal formulated in the article and presented above was achieved.In addition to linguistic and lexicographic data, the facts of linguistic statistics were also described, which made it possible to determine the volume occupied in the semantic structure of the word 'way' by one or another lexical-semantic variant.