Using syntactic strategies on problems of technical vocabulary

(excerpted from Campbell 1997)

Syntactic strategies for reorganizing sentences go only so far in aiding nonexpert readers. The syntactic characteristics of the scientific-technical register (see Ulijn and Strother 1995: 100, 107) differ little from those of the common language, though tending to heavier use of nominalizations, passives, and compounds. Greater difficulty for nonexpert readers comes from what seem to be lexical problems: not understanding common words that have special meanings within a discipline (eg, boot a computer, abort a process), or compounded words (eg, general protection fault)--Schlangenwörter, or "snake words".

Schlangenwörter, however, can be considered as a syntactic problem masquerading as a lexical problem, because they can be deciphered with the aid of syntactic tools. A conventional way of doing this is to regard a noun string as the end-product of a transformation process, where two or more canonical sentences have undergone embedding and reduction to the hard-surfaced noun-string technical term. The problem is that, if we suppose such a term to have a deep structure, there are sometimes two or several possible deep structures.

Take "general protection fault," the annoying message that Windows 95 gives its users when it is about to crash. Less reduced versions might be, "A fault that gives general protection" or "A general fault that gives protection," depending on how one brackets it: (general protection [fault]) or (general [protection fault]). I rather suspect that such terms do not, in fact, follow any transformational rule, or if they do, they attenuate a good deal of information. There was an ad in my local newspaper not long ago for an "insurance repair specialist." A specialist who repairs insurance? A specialist in repairs for insurance? The latter sense is closer: an insurance repair specialist is someone who repairs the bodies of automobiles damaged in collisions when these repairs are paid for by insurance companies.

If an editor "de-transforms" such terms, it is the re-establishment of syntactic relations that lets the nonexpert reader find meaning in the terms. And, I would suggest, the meaning supplied by nonexpert readers doing their own de-transformations will not always yield the result intended by the experts.

The emergence of meaning out of compounds can be demonstrated by using a tool that has been used to lampoon bureaucratic prose for at least thirty years. This is the Buzz Phrase Projector, attributed by Gallagher (1969) to Philip Broughton of the U.S. Public Health Service:

The idea is to pick a three-digit number; the corresponding words in each of the three columns yields a three-word jargon phrase: 538 equals "responsive reciprocal hardware"; 273 equals "systematized incremental mobility". (Electrical engineering students at the University of Texas, Austin, developed "The Electrotechnophrase Generator", which comes up with "differential Yagi transducer" and "phasor tracking simulation". See Beer and McMurrey, 1997). The Social Science Jargon Generator (reproduced by Pinker, 1994) yields combinations like "quantitative homogeneous plasticity" and "differentiated progressive deformation." It is not hard to imagine contexts in which one could use such phrases.

These phrase generators were developed for humorous purposes, to demonstrate the extreme nonsense that can come from piling up abstract nouns and adjectives, or in Pinker's case, to demonstrate how a word-chain device works. Yet making nominal compounds is a quite normal activity, one which often causes little confusion. No professor is likely to misunderstand an administrative directive that says, "Please fill out your sabbatical leave request form by October 30". Few workers in the personnel office will go wrong if told that "The human resources management training session will be held in Room 343." Every school guidance counselor in the United States is likely to know what is a "drug abuse resistance education orientation seminar."

Such compounding is arguably necessary in technical fields. Sometimes, when compounds become unwieldy, they have to be further reduced to initialisms:

Mercury-cadmium-tellurium films grown by liquid phase epitaxy on cadmium-tellurium and cadmium-zinc-tellurium substrates have become the primary materials used in manufacturing infrared detector focal plane arrays.

The chemical names slow down the reading of the expert, as do the full names of well known (within the field) processes and components. Hence, abbreviations and initialisms:

HgCdTe films grown by LPE on CdTe and CdZnTe substrates have become the primary materials used in manufacturing infrared detector FPAs.

Another example:

Photon assisted MBE has been shown to produce a RHEED surface reconstruction consistent with a Cd-rich growth surface while using a single source of CdTe.

"RHEED" turns out to stand for "reflection high energy electron diffraction." The full nominal compound without initialism, would be "reflection high energy electron diffraction surface reconstruction." Such a term seems to defy understanding by anyone who is not a materials engineer.

Nevertheless, syntactic strategies can help nonexperts hazard an educated guess about the meaning of these segmented Schlangenwörter. If one can discover that SIRIS is "sputter initiated resonance ionization spectroscopy," one could guess that the phrase means "spectroscopy using ionization produced by a resonance that is initiated by a sputter." That is, a sputter of electrons or other particles ionizes molecules in a thin film so they resonate, and this resonance can be detected by a spectroscope. In such cases, it is grammatical knowledge that helps us make sense of technical terminology.

References

Beer, David, and David McMurrey. 1997. A Guide to Writing as an Engineer. New York: Wiley.

Campbell, Charles P. 1997. "Using linguistic concepts as tools for improving technical editing." Birgit Smieja and Mieke Tasch, eds., Human Contact through Language and Linguistics. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

Gallagher, William J. 1969. Report Writing for Management. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley.

Pinker, Steven. 1994. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: HarperCollins.

Ulijn, Jan M., and Judith B. Strother. 1995. Communicating in Business and Technology: From Psycholinguistics to International Practice. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.