Denomination of Dosage Forms in Russia: Development of the Terms

Abstract

The research deals with the issue of terms and their functioning in professional discourse. According to the cognitive and discourse approach, a term is regarded as a representative of knowledge which participates in the processes of receiving, processing, storing and transmitting information about the world and human activity. The purpose of the research is to investigate the linguistic characteristics of terms belonging to the pharmaceutical terminology system at different stages of its development. The article contains analysis of two sets of terms introduced during two historical periods: at the stage of formation of the terminology system (17th century) and at the modern stage (since the beginning of the 21st century). Each of the stages is represented by its own type of terminologization. The research material is composed of Latin/Latinized and Russian terms with the meaning ‘dosage form’ found in pharmaceutical documents (handwritten recipes of the 17th century from the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts; State Pharmacopoeias of the Russian Federation). The first part of the study describes the thematic group ‘names of dosage forms’ of the 17th century. Latin and corresponding Russian terms and nomenclature names formed on their basis are analyzed in this part. The reason for the presence of variations within the terminology group is studied. In the second part of the paper, the linguistic and extralinguistic reasons for the transformation of this group of terminological units are studied, the productivity of new models for the denomination of dosage forms is analyzed. Methodologically, the study is based on the comparative, structural, etymological methods of analysis, the expert method (used when selecting terms from the collection of pharmaceutical texts) and terminological modeling. The authors came to the following conclusions: being an instrument of language of professional communication, a term expresses a special concept and develops in the process of functioning; due to its dynamic nature, a term develops in discourse and forms new connections within the terminology system of the professional discourse (pharmacy, in the case of our study); on the other hand, the development of the terminology system contributes to the process of ordering terminology.