Publications

Publication details [#54083]

Kageura, Kyo. 2010. Analysing the status of borrowed morphemes in terminological structure. The case of Japanese terminologies. Terminology 16 (2) : 181–é&§.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Language as a subject
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/term

Annotation

Borrowed morphemes play an important role in Japanese terminologies. Though several investigations have dealt with the status of borrowed morphemes in Japanese terminologies, the status of borrowed morphemes within the structure of terminologies has not been fully addressed so far. In order to clarify the status of borrowed morphemes within the terminological structure, this paper introduces the concept of morphological network of terminology and investigates the status of morphemes within the network from the point of view of their conceptual versatility, conceptual prestige and the mixing degree between borrowed and native morphemes. Through the analyses of the terminologies of six domains, it sheds light on aspects of the status of borrowed morphemes which have hitherto been unaddressed. The study also shows the general usefulness of the concept of morphological network in examining the status of different types of morphemes. With minor exceptions, it was revealed that the borrowed morphemes are used not only less frequently both typewise and tokenwise, but also have less conceptual versatility and conceptual prestige in comparison with native morphemes. It is confirmed that the borrowed and native morphemes are less mixed than would be expected if randomness was assumed.