Technical Terms Used in Scientific Writing: A Morphological and Semantic Study

ABSTRACT

Scientific writing is a media of communication between the readers and the writer, this has a special terms that are not all people able to interpret the meaning of the term. In fact, the form of the technical term is almost the same with form of the word in the ordinary language, but the meaning contains that make it special. The focus of interest of this study is what word formation process and the mostly used in the technical terms used in scientific writing and the meaning change that happened on it.

The objective of this research is to describe the word formation process and identify which type of word formation process that is mostly used in the technical terms of the scientific writing and also to identify the meaning change (Semantic study) of the technical terms in scientific writing. This research is designed by using descriptive qualitative method. They are analyzed inductively through the observation done by the researcher himself. The data are collected from Scientific Writing under the topic according to the studied program at UIN Malang.

Research instruments used to get the data is the researcher himself. It is the
suitable instrument because the data is available in printed materials. The analysis of the data is presenting the data, include the scientific writing in brief and the gathered words, developing table of the result. And the last is interpreting the result in the data interpretation.

As the result, the researcher finds that the main findings of this study include first of all, the word formation is mostly used in the technical terms used in scientific writing, are: Borrowing, Compounding, Derivation, Multiple process, Acronym and Stem word. And the last, the type of meaning change of the technical term is Extension or Generalization; a lexeme which widens its meaning.

Since this study only discusses the word formation process and what mostly used and also the meaning change of the technical terms, it will be interesting to study other phenomenon of Morphology and Semantic. Finally, the researcher suggest to the next researchers to study the other aspect in order to enrich the understanding about word-formation and semantic.