The Lexico-semantic Field “Higher Education.” An Interpretation of the Lexemes “Formation,” “Étude,” and “Éducation” (Based on Texts in French and Russian)

Abstract

The article explores the problem of interpreting the lexemes “formation,” “étude,” and “éducation of in lexico-semantic field “Higher education.” This issue is topical because of the intensification of academic exchanges, and therefore the need for translations, and of frequent education reforms that lead to changes in terminology. There is a brief description of modeling the lexico-semantic field “Higher education” in French and Russian using the T-Lab computer program for automatic text processing and its linguistic and statistical analysis tools. The corpus of texts taken from the sites of leading French and Russian universities (24,000 words each) was analyzed. Associative fields of terms in question were obtained and minimal contexts illustrating their use were extracted. The problem of the multivaluedness of the terms “formation,” “étude,” and “éducation” is considered in detail. Their abstractness makes it difficult to interpret them. A comparison was made between their functioning within fields, and difficulties in understanding certain concepts were identified. In particular, the “formation” lexeme is the most universal in meaning: it means “education, training” and “educational program”; the lexeme “education” means “education, socialization, all-round education,” and the lexeme “étude” means “learning process.” We conclude that the high degree of abstractness of these terms and the lack of order within the terminology makes it difficult to understand the texts about education in French, and also to translate them into Russian.