I. YAKOVLEV CHUVASH STATE PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY BULLETIN

term, sport, thesaurus, semantic relations, associative relations

Within the English discourse of sport there are many special concepts that do not coincide in meaning with Russian terms. As a result, Russian people learning the English language do not understand the meaning of English sports terms and are confused in their use. The current research is aimed at systematizing English discourse of sport, and namely its football terminology, and revealing the semiotic structure of terms within it via thesaurus modelling of terms related to this discourse. In the first part of the work there is a description of the way the English thesaurus of sports terms was constructed. In addition, the author explains why the semiotic theory was chosen as the basis for this research. In the second part of the work the author presented a semantic field for the term football with a visual scheme of semantic relations. The research showed that there are no isolated terms in football discourse and all terms are connected with each other through hierarchic, synonymic, variance and associative relations. Moreover, systematizing terms via the thesaurus approach could help not only differenciate the nuances in meaning of sports terms but also illustrate the relations among these terms due to the constructed schemes. The achieved results can be used for the vocational training of students majoring in linguistics, sports, and Physical Education teachers.

Жучкова Ирина Игоревна – кандидат филологических наук, доцент кафедры английского языка Ульяновского государственного педагогического университета имени И. Н. Ульянова, г. Ульяновск, Россия; e-mail: zhuchkova.ii@inbox.ru