Linguistic modelling of archaeological terminology: From archaeological description to parametric

Abstract

The article attempts to systematize the terminology of archaeological ceramics. The terminological nomination of the ancient vessels appears to be of an arbitrary nature, which inevitably leads to term-sign asymmetry — there are several different objects behind one word and vice versa — the same thing has different names. The asymmetry of the archaeological term is explained by the fact that it does not go through all the stages of the special concept formation — from systematization, classification of the experimental material to generalization and choice of a term-sign. For more than a hundred years, scientists have been trying to formalize the description of ancient vessels, but there is still no single approach to regulation of the terminology. A brief review of the studies on archaeological ceramics has shown that researchers offer different sets of characteristics while separate, even classifying characteristics, do not solve the problem of the formalized description of archaeological terminology. The conceptual analysis of the ancient vessel descriptions has revealed 11 universal parameters: shape, function, constructive parameter, obligatory structural elements, metric parameter, degree of the metric parameter manifestation, proportions, quantitative parameter, cultural-geographical parameter, chronological parameter, and material of construction. The paper describes the parametric analysis of the terminology of ancient vessels in several stages — the selection of the description of the vessels’ names and the term definitions; the analysis of the ancient vessels’ descriptions in order to identify and group all the characteristics into parameters. The parametric analysis made it possible to classify all the terms into monosemantic ones — with a specific set and content of the parameters and polysemantic, which differ in the set or in the content of the parameters.