Articles
Motivated and unmotivated words in the lexical group “Earth, its structure” in Russian and Polish language
The purpose of this article is a comparative analysis of motivated and unmotivated words in the lexical group “Earth, its structure” in Russian and Polish. The basis for the selection of the material is The Russian Semantic Dictionary ed. N.Yu. Shvedova. After compiling aglossary, in which 227 names in Russian and 225 in Polish had been included, the names have been divided into three groups: unmotivated words, motivated words and compound names.
After comparing the results of comparative analysis it can be concluded that in the lexical group “Earth, its structure” unmotivated words are the most numerous in both languages 49.78% in Russian and 42.67% in Polish. This is due to the fact that, on the one hand, alarge part of the vocabulary associated with nature has Slavic origin and thus a lot of them are common in both languages. On the other hand, in the analyzed lexical group there are alot of specialized terms, hence such alarge number of loanwords in both languages, with the status of internationalisms. Another large group are simple derivatives 29.96% of the analyzed material in Russian and 25.33% in Polish. The main difference between them is the number of compound names. In Polish there are five times more compound names 18.66% than in equivalent lexical group in Russian 3.52%. The tendency to use compound name instead of asimple-name is perhaps one of the characteristics of Polish scientific terminology. Thus, acomparative analysis of the vocabulary in these two languages shows anomination mechanisms and trends in word formation.