AUTHOR’S MODALITY AS A MARKER OF THE TERM FORMATION STAGE

The relevance of this work is caused, firstly, by the selection of study material, which is the English-language nanotechnology discourse. The selected discipline segment is developing at a quick pace that causes the dynamism of the term formation processes and the possibility to trace them in real-time mode. Moreover, the parameters of the author’s modality in the scientific text were being studied only fragmentarily that proves the necessity of their analysis. The paper covers the consideration of the author’s modality actualization in the text and its direct relationship with the stages of the term formation. During the study, the author carried out the chronological analysis of the English-language scientific articles covering a single subject matter (in particular, related to the scanning tunneling microscopy) in order to identify the means of expressing the author’s modality used in them. At the same time, the author makes an attempt to associate logically the application of these means with the period of development of a scientific object and, consequently, with the stage of formation of a term nominating it. In the paper, special attention is paid to the application of modal verbs, modal adjectives and adverbs characterized by the highest frequency of use in the English-language nanotechnology text. During the analysis, the author identified the means of expressing the author’s modality marking the specific stage of a term development and proposed the model of scientific article text construction based on the used author’s modality means. It is concluded that the new knowledge and the terminological unit actualizing it undergo the identical stages of formation that, in the text of scientific work, is reflected in the semantics of means used to express the author’s modality and their concentration in the structure of the text.