Peculiarities of English oil and gas terminology

Abstract

The terminological homonymy of the English technical terms of oil and gas terminology, formed on the semantic decay of a word, is the basis for lexical units with different denotations. Identification and analysis of homonymy in the terminology of special English vocabulary is one of the urgent tasks of the professional language. It plays an important role in many scientific contexts, for example, in power engineering, oil and gas fields development, production of fossil fuels, machinery engineering, etc. The lexical analysis of the terminological units of oil and gas sphere, based on the metaphorization and polysemy, shows that special terms may undergo semantic changes and transform into homonyms – a random coincidence of words identical in sound form and spelling but different in meaning. The homonyms, which name different phenomena, do not duplicate and do not contradict each other as one of the terms becomes more commonly used in the scientific environment, and subsequently the only one generally recognized by the specialists.